In the summer of 2018 BITrum, together with an international consortium of European and Latin American institutions, submitted a project proposal in clear continuity with the interdisciplinary glossary that BITrum started 10 years ago. The proposal, which was approved at the beginning of 2019, was presented to a call of the Institute of Scientific Research and Technological Development of Santa Elena, Ecuador (INCYT / UPSE, Ecuador) under the title "glossaLAB: Integrating and co-creating knowledge through interdisciplinary glossaries and tools for semantic analysis and interoperability ". With a starting point at the theoretical corpus of three encyclopaedic works, among which Charles François’ prestigious encyclopaedia of systems science strand out, it also intends to make use of the methodology of analysis of the integration of knowledge achieved through interdisciplinary glossaries, which has been developed within the framework of several projects linked to glossariumBITri in recent years. Several recent publications describe both the methodology and the results achieved.^1,2

Objetives

glossaLAB generally aims to develop, within the two years of project lifetime, an interactive and open platform for conceptual elucidation and its application to the interdisciplinary co-creation, learning and dissemination of knowledge that supports interdisciplinary frameworks (in particular the general study of systems and information). This development involves activity at several levels: at the technical level, the development of an open platform that allows the re-compilation of valuable scattered encyclopaedic contents, in order that these are semantically interoperable, as well as tools that allow content analysis, as well as the visualization and semantic navigation. At the theoretical level, it is pursued an increase in "intensional" performance (reduction of conceptual redundancy) and the elucidation of concepts, theoretical frameworks and problems not considered in the original knowledge base. At the meta-theoretical level, the evaluation of the integration of knowledge based on diversity and the integration of the conceptual network. 

 

GlossaLAB gives continuity to the interactive-glossariumBITri with advanced functionalities, as an integral part of the glossariumBITri multimodal publishing system (partially developed under the glossariumBITri-UPSE project, 2017-2018), the International Encyclopaedia of Systems and Cybernetics (directed by Charles François) and the Principia Cybernetica (directed by F. Heylighen, C. Joslyn and V. Turchin). The highest level of knowledge integration corresponds to the Encyclopaedia of Systems Science and Cybernetics Online that will host the contents of the 3 mentioned resources. It will also serve as a basis for the development of other interdisciplinary glossaries as a theoretical-methodological tool for the integration of knowledge and the evaluation of the results of scientific integration (as foreseen in PRIMER initiative).

Consortium

GlossaLAB’s consortium comprises 3 Ecuadorian universities (the aforementioned Santa Elena Peninsula State University, the Salesiana Polytechnic University and the Yachay-Tech University), 3 Spanish universities (Madrid Open University, that will carry out a technical coordination of the project, Universidad de León and Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and 3 research entities (BITrum-Research Group, Spain, the Institute for a Global Sustainable Information Society-GSIS of Austria, and the International Society for the Study of Information-IS4SI, Austria).

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(1) DÍAZ-NAFRÍA, J.M.; BURGIN, M.; RODRÍGUEZ-BRAVO, B. (2019). Evaluation of Knowledge Integration through Knowledge Structures and Conceptual Networks. In G. Dodig-Crnkovic, M. Burgin (eds.), Philosophy and Methodology of Information, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. (BITrum's contributions blog)

(2) A Network Theoretical Approach to Assess Knowledge Integration in Information Studies. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, 94: 360-371. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-78605-6_31(BITrum's contributions blog)