The NetAcademy: A Novel Approach to Domain-Specific Scientific Knowledge Accumulation, Dissemination and Review

Over the last decade the speed at which knowledge is generated has greatly accelerated, thus exacerbating the problem of finding the right information at the right time and posing new kinds of challenges to the management of an ever increasing pool of knowledge. Taking up the ideas of the ancient Greek concept of Academia, the “NetAcademy” is aiming at providing a knowledge medium to aid in the creation, integration, reviewing and dissemination of domain-specific knowledge in the scientific community taking full advantage of the unique characteristics of the Internet medium. The vision is to offer an open structure and management concept for virtually any kind of field of research in search of an intelligible organization of its contents. The paper emphasizes on the motivation of the NetAcademy concept and its feasibility on the basis of available Internet technologies. The main part discusses the three key concepts which differentiate the NetAcademy from more traditional approaches to digital libraries: the system-immanent vocabulary allowing for the mediation of knowledge through powerful search mechanisms on a semantic level, an integrated system of roles that allows rights and duties to be assigned to agents interacting with the medium and the modular, template-based design.