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Communities have experienced considerable growth since digital instrumentation based on Information and Communication Technologies that shape and organize the world of the Web and socio-numerical networks. By analysing the emergence and Collective Intelligence potential of a community of developers outside the organization chart of the Information Systems Department of a large energy company, we identified a decentralized organizational approach that allows for community resolution of problems related to the company’s core activities and opens parallel opportunities for social innovation in the company’s historical operations.
Communication information technology tools provide easy access to vast amounts of human knowledge. Knowledge is used to empower and enrich people culturally and materially and to build a sustainable society. Social networks, OCWs, MOOCs and connectivist approaches to learning contribute significantly to the construction of this knowledge. But the study of these new digital learning environments (ENA) is also becoming more complicated. The use of complex system modelling makes it possible to transcribe the observed phenomena and facilitate their analysis using specific tools. This paper presents and highlights the value of the complex systems theory for the study of the new-generation ENA behaviour. It describes in depth a realistic approach and proposes effective management tools.
In this article, we focus on the knowledge organization activities of specialists in Higher Education and Research insofar as they contribute to the circulation of knowledge and the evolution of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS). The scientific fields to which these specialists are institutionally attached are recomposed in epistemic communities that carry out similar activities in terms of information research, knowledge production and access to information. To make these activities, communities, particularly in the human and social sciences, have tools, services and devices that are part of the "Digital Humanities" movement. The two major French bibliographic agencies (ABES and BnF) are taking part in this movement by applying the entity-relation model to the data, which is gradually extending to subject indexing (subject headings, thesauri, etc.). The knowledge produced by epistemic communities is therefore closely linked to digital research infrastructures based on standardization and mutualization, which form a distributed and common technological foundation. While the scientific community expresses the multidisciplinary, multidisciplinary, even transdisciplinary nature of the objects it studies, we are interested in the conditions under which the Web of data can meet the needs of structuring and organizing the knowledge of these epistemic communities. To what extent do KOS maintain a prominent place within the "Digital Humanities" and their socio-technical devices? How to value the heuristic properties of KOS during the indexing process carried out by specialists in these epistemic communities? In order to answer these questions, we study technical orientations, components and functioning of three Digital Research Infrastructures (HAL, ISIDORE, Persée). We note that the production and circulation of knowledge is based on the technological power of the devices and highlight the presence of many KOS and a fragmented valuation of subject indexing. So, we are interested in the conditions of possibilities for cross-fertilization of KOS and propose to use Linked Open Data (LOD) to build an interoperability model between the KOS of epistemic communities in order to compose a documentary continuum.
