The dream of a global knowledge network—A new approach

Decades of research have been devoted to the goal of creating systems which integrate information into a global knowledge network, yet we still face problems of cross-repository interoperability, lack of public infrastructure, and a coherent research agenda—both theoretical and practical—to face these challenges. Interest in the semantic Web has revived the dream, but many are sceptical. This article offers a breakthrough to problems of semantic interoperability and defends the feasibility of a global knowledge network against traditional counterarguments. It offers a new approach based on (i) interdisciplinary research of scholarly and scientific discourse, (ii) a generic global ontological model based on relations and co-reference rather than objects, (iii) semi-automatic maintenance of co-reference links, and (iv) public engagement in the creation and development of the network.