This is a scenario meant to show a few capabilities when working in a DKR (Dynamic Knowledge Repository) environment. Please don’t read for specific logic, artistic licence has been applied for and granted by the imagination guild of cyberspace.
Joe, from ‘Augmenting Human Intellect’ ’62, and you sit down at a nice desktop computer with a large, high resolution screen and Joe asks you about how it’s been going organising the 50th Anniversary of the Doug demo and you start mumbling something and it all seems a bit incoherent and he then points out that this is actually a great start for a demo of the 21st Century DKR so he fires up his ‘DKR Chat’ application.
Before he does anything specific he congratulates you for the early decision not to try to implement a DKR as a single product but as a way to tying together current protocols and practices into a large collaborative workspace, in effect turning the internet into a DKR.
You decide to start by looking how you decided to incorporate JSON technologies into the project – you can’t remember exactly why or how you planned to use it.
‘DKR Chat’, he reminds you, is a chat system build on Solid, which stores the dialog of the group’s discussions and evolution. Since everything in the DKR environment is richly meta-tagged, including real-world time-code stamped for video and audio he can choose to see anyone’s comments based any criteria, such as comments which included a URL in the discussion and so on – the chat effectively also becomes a time browser.
DKR Chat is only one application in the DKR ecosystem, other people have built what they call OHS Chat and he points out he is not entirely happy with their choice of names but it really doesn’t matter, the DKR is not a piece of software, it is an ecosystem of interactions so anyone can build any type of tool to do anything they are capable of imagining and implementing.
* In the DKR ecosystem, the only limits are the size of your ideas and the degree of your dedication + your ability to make your data interoperable *
After typing a few keywords searches for ‘JSON’ Joe decides to show off a little and speaks: “Show me all the comments Jack made which were replied to by Stan and was about JSON” and the screen shows the results. It’s a neat trick and then he asks: “Show me all the chats where someone mentions JSON” and you have a screen full of sentences which includes the word JSON.
Now it’s both hands on deck. Joe clicks and drags the sentences around the screen and chooses to assign colours to some of the different people on the team who spoke more about JSON than the rest. He then uses this to cluster people and other relevant keywords into a beautiful diagram of the discussions.
You come across JSON-LD and you ask Joe what they is and in half a second he has the wikipedia definition up on the screen and that is somewhat useful and all occurrences of JSON-LD are visually linked to help you see where they were mentioned.
After a while of moving the information space around you feel you have come to understand better why and how JSON was used so you ask Joe to pack it up and publish a rich PDF for you which you send to Stan.
Stan has a system for his email which takes all PDFs and stores them in his cloud where all meta-data from the rich PDF is extracted and he has set an AI bot to look for a few key interests and alert him, so he is alerted to this email and he chooses to open the rich PDF into his AI Ecosystem app, which is fully DKR compliant and integrated, meaning he gets all the sophisticated views you and Joe created in DKR Chat plus specialist tools for his particular world. Stan runs some other AI routines on the document space, watches the view change and then changes it a bit further and then has another insight, which he adds/annotates onto the space and connects live to Jack’s knowledge garden where Jack sees what he is talking about but changes the perspective completely, looking at the space from the point of view of the concepts, not the people. Jack then he sees some interesting relationships and locks it into the document for Stan who sends it back to you. You then open the document and realise that you were looking at it from an odd perspective and now it all largely makes sense but something doesn’t fit so Jack gives you access to plug into his knowledge garden and when you play around with some connections and relationships you also ‘get it’.
Now you feel you have a good ‘story’ of how it all came about so you publish to a repository as a ‘document’/documentation, which features powerful archival support and you are secure in the knowledge it will both be stored and also consulted, since all the meta data and all the special views are encoded in the document so the server can perform operations on the document plus millions of others. Anyone can now search directly in the document based on keywords, availability of specific citations or views and so on.
You then tell the system to transfer an address of the document to Houria who chooses to put on her high-resolution VR Headset and look around the view, making changes of her own. While in the VR space she adds some voice annotations and curates a thread which she forwards to Wendy who receives it on her phone, interactively speaking the journey of what the document has revealed.
And there we go. Wendy sends it to Les who uses entirely different software to interact with the space and so on. The DKR allows the user to interact with incredible amounts of accessible data in extremely deep ways and to share it widely.