What is an Online Knowledge Society?
An Online Knowledge Society (OKS) is a scalable society of distributed knowledge spaces. It has multiple users and communities that can interact with each other whenever they are online and form a peer-to-peer network of knowledge spaces that can be semantically searched depending on their availability (i.e., if they are online) and the amount of mutual trust they have acquired.
The OPAALS OKS is a collaborative knowledge creation and sharing space for the Digital Ecosystems, multi-disciplinary research community as well as SMEs. It provides the ability to navigate semantic networks of the many ontological categories that make up the OKS's body of knowledge, including expertise, disciplines, cultures and geographical locations. It provides users with their own personal, customisable research space, the ability to collaborate with others in similar networks and thus continue the process of knowledge and network generation that is part of a knowledge society.
The OKS is built on an open source, distributed, peer-to-peer architecture. Its recursive and self-reinforcing nature is inspired by biology and enabled by the capabilities of semantic web technologies. You are participating in one right now!