Meme Media and Meme Pools for Re-editing and Redistributing Intellectual Assets

Nowadays the research topics of science and technology are diversified and segmented into more and more categories. The number of interdisciplinary research topics has also increased. With increasingly sophisticated research on science and technology, there is a growing need for interdisciplinary and international availability, distribution and exchange of the latest research results, in re-editable and redistributable organic forms, including not only research papers and multimedia documents, but also various tools developed for measurement, analysis, inference, design, planning, simulation, and production. Similar needs are also growing for the interdisciplinary and international availability, distribution and exchange of ideas and works among artists, musicians, designers, architects, directors, and producers. We need new media technologies that externalize scientific, technological, and/or cultural knowledge fragments in an organic way, and promote their advanced use, international distribution, reuse, and re-editing. These media should be able to carry a variety of intellectual assets. A media object denotes such a medium with a content intellectual asset. Such media objects can replicate themselves, recombine themselves, and be naturally selected by people reusing them. We call them 'meme media' since they carry what Richard Dawkins called 'memes'. In his book, " The Selfish Gene " [1] published in 1976, Dawkins suggested provocatively that ideas (he called them memes) are like genes and that societies have meme pools in just the same way as they have gene pools. Whereas genes exist in a physical environment, 'memes' exist within a society. M. J. Stefik at Xerox PARC also pointed out, in 1986, the importance of developing new knowledge media that work as memes [2]. A fundamental and necessary framework for the growth and distribution of 'memes' is a 'meme pool'. A 'meme pool' is an accumulation of 'memes' in a society and functions like a gene pool. 'Meme media', together with a 'meme pool' provide a framework for the farming of knowledge. When economic activities are introduced, a 'meme pool' becomes a 'meme market' where providers and distributors of 'memes' should be able to carry out their business without prohibiting the replication, re-editing and redistribution of 'memes' by users. We have been conducting the research and development of 'meme media' and 'meme market' architectures since 1987. We developed 2D and 3D meme media architectures 'IntelligentPad' and 'IntelligentBox' respectively in 1989 and in 1995 [3∼9], and have been working on their meme-pool and meme-market architectures, as well as on their applications and revisions.