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I have the pleasure to announce that the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) has been born. (1YGF) Formally established in Trento, Italy in April 2009, after an open meeting at the FOIS 2008 conference, IAOA is a non-profit, open association with the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information systems development, library and information science, scientific research and semantic technologies in general.

The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is an interdisciplinary research and development center at Harvard dedicated to using innovative computing tools to accelerate discovery across all of the scientific disciplines.

Interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard and elsewhere naturally tend to be distributed geographically, across campuses and departments. Effective collaboration for these programs requires the ability to bridge distance, which in turn implies digital collaboration, and therefore abilities to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives; to provide semantic context to on-line content for more powerful interactions within multiple sub-disciplines and to integrate as well as distinguish the individual contributions of many scientific workers.

Knowledge has generally existed within strict disciplinary boundaries, creating barriers against the free flow of information. The boundaries between disciplines reduces the ability of researchers to fully assess the work that has been accomplished and can lead to redundancy and to situations in which scholars are "reinventing the wheel" when they could instead be advancing knowledge into new frontiers. Is there a solution? There is if we take the time to create a cross-disciplinary understanding of knowledge representation and organization. The solution would require a comprehensive, interdisciplinary effort from scholars in diverse disciplines including communications, sociology, anthropology, information science, biology, computer science and philosophy. The Structure for Encompassing Extensible Knowledge (SEEK) is a model I propose to explore the possibilities for knowledge integration theoretically, technologically and from the perspective of human management.

Recent Sensemaking Research