Summary report: workshop on knowledge media networking

Virtual distributed communities are emerging using the rapid technological advances in networking, multiagents, virtual environments, media and broadcasting technologies. Current information and communications technologies provide the infrastructure to send bits anywhere , but do not presume to handle information at the semantic level. This imposes people heavy load of manipulating information, including choosing, interpreting, skimming, and integrating information. Knowledge Media Networked spaces would couple models, knowledge, media, instruments, and intellectual activity across space, time, applications, and disciplinary boundaries to support activities and arrangements for teams, organizations, communities. Exploiting agent trends, these spaces could support people in finding and communicating with others with similar interests, needs and goals, to form new communities with their own traditions, cultures, norms, and conventions; to build their own virtual environments on 3D media with unique atmospheres and characteristics; to offer people new forms of interaction and presentation in business, education, and entertainment. The knowledge media networked spaces would support sharable ontologies, spatial semantic structures, processes for distributed classification and taxonomy, collaborative knowledge construction, representation and filtering tools, digital libraries and repositories across disciplines and application domains.