On the quest for changing knowledge

Abstract

For centuries, science (in German "Wissenschaft") has aimed to create ("schaffen") new knowledge ("Wissen") from the observation of physical phenomena, their modeling and empirical validation. With this vision paper, we propose to do so by observing not the physical, but the virtual world, namely the Web with its ever growing stream of data materialized in the form of social network chattering, content produced on demand by crowds of people, messages exchanged among interlinked devices in the Internet of Things, and similar. The knowledge we may find there can be dispersed, informal, contradicting and ephemeral today, while already tomorrow it may be commonly accepted. The challenge is capturing knowledge that is new, has not been formalized yet (e.g., in existing knowledge bases), and is buried inside a big, moving target (the stream of online data). The purpose is to provide data-driven innovation scenarios with the necessary food (up-to-date knowledge) and to do so timely.