Understanding the Cognitive Impact of Emerging Web Technologies: A Research Focus Area for Embodied, Extended and Distributed Approaches to Cognition

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is also a need to explore the effects of the Web on our cognitive profile. This is particularly so as the range of interactive opportunities we have with the Web expands under the influence of a range of emerging technologies. Embodied, extended and distributed approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the potential cognitive impact of these new technologies because of the emphasis they place on extra-neural and extra-corporeal factors in the shaping of our cognitive capabilities at both an individual and collective level. The current paper outlines a number of areas where embodied, extended and distributed approaches to cognition are useful in understanding the impact of emerging Web technologies on future forms of both human and machine intelligence

Mandevillian Intelligence: From Individual Vice to Collective Virtue

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive shortcomings, limitations and biases play a positive functional role in yielding various forms of collective cognitive success. When this idea is transposed to the epistemological domain, mandevillian intelligence emerges as the idea that individual forms of intellectual vice may, on occasion, support the epistemic performance of some form of multi-agent ensemble, such as a socio-epistemic system, a collective doxastic agent, or an epistemic group agent. As a specific form of collective intelligence, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to a number of debates in social epistemology, especially those that seek to understand how group (or collective) knowledge arises from the interactions between a collection of individual epistemic agents. Beyond this, however, mandevillian intelligence raises issues that are relevant to the research agendas of both virtue epistemology and applied epistemology. From a virtue epistemological perspective, mandevillian intelligence encourages us to adopt a relativistic conception of intellectual vice/virtue, enabling us to see how individual forms of intellectual vice may (sometimes) be relevant to collective forms of intellectual virtue. In addition, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to the nascent sub-discipline of applied epistemology. In particular, mandevillian intelligence forces us see the potential epistemic value of (e.g., technological) interventions that create, maintain or promote individual forms of intellectual vice

Embodiment, Cognition and the World Wide Web

Cognitive embodiment refers to the hypothesis that cognitive processes of all kinds are rooted in perception and action. Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience revealed that the motor cortex, long confined to the mere role of action programming and execution, in fact, plays a crucial role in complex cognitive abilities

Cognition and the Web

Empirical research related to the Web has typically focused on its impact to social relationships and wider society; however, the cognitive impact of the Web is also an increasing focus of scientific interest and research attention. In this paper, I attempt to provide an overview of what I see as the important issues in the debate regarding the relationship between human cognition and the Web. I argue that the Web is potentially poised to transform our cognitive and epistemic profiles, but that in order to understand the nature of this influence we need to countenance a position that factors in the available scientific evidence, the changing nature of our interaction with the Web, and the possibility that many of our everyday cognitive achievements rely on complex webs of social and technological scaffolding. I review the literature relating to the cognitive effects of current Web technology, and I attempt to anticipate the cognitive impact of next-generation technologies, such as Web-based augmented reality systems and the transition to data-centric modes of information representation. I suggest that additional work is required to more fully understand the cognitive impact of both current and future Web technologies, and I identify some of the issues for future scientific work in this area. Given that recent scientific effort around the Web has coalesced into a new scientific discipline, namely that of Web Science, I suggest that many of the issues related to cognition and the Web could form part of the emerging Web Science research agenda

Applications and Uses of Dental Ontologies

The development of a number of large-scale semantically-rich ontologies for biomedicine attests to the interest of life science researchers and clinicians in Semantic Web technologies. To date, however, the dental profession has lagged behind other areas of biomedicine in developing a commonly accepted, standardized ontology to support the representation of dental knowledge and information. This paper attempts to identify some of the potential uses of dental ontologies as part of an effort to motivate the development of ontologies for the dental domain. The identified uses of dental ontologies include support for advanced data analysis and knowledge discovery capabilities, the implementation of novel education and training technologies, the development of information exchange and interoperability solutions, the better integration of scientific and clinical evidence into clinical decision-making, and the development of better clinical decision support systems. Some of the social issues raised by these uses include the ethics of using patient data without consent, the role played by ontologies in enforcing compliance with regulatory criteria and legislative constraints, and the extent to which the advent of the Semantic Web introduces new training requirements for dental students. Some of the technological issues relate to the need to extract information from a variety of resources (for example, natural language texts), the need to automatically annotate information resources with ontology elements, and the need to establish mappings between a variety of existing dental terminologies

Social Machines

The term ‘social machine’ has recently been coined to refer to Web-based systems that support a variety of socially-relevant processes. Such systems (e.g., Wikipedia, Galaxy Zoo, Facebook, and reCAPTCHA) are progressively altering the way a broad array of social activities are performed, ranging from the way we communicate and transmit knowledge, establish romantic partnerships, generate ideas, produce goods and maintain friendships. They are also poised to deliver new kinds of intelligent processing capability by virtue of their ability to integrate the complementary contributions of both the human social environment and a global nexus of distributed computational resources. This chapter provides an overview of recent research into social machines. It examines what social machines are and discusses the kinds of social machines that currently exist. It also presents a range of issues that are the focus of current research attention within the Web Science community

A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefitfrom human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies

Emergent Capabilities for Collaborative Teams in the Evolving Web Environment

This paper reports on our investigation of the latest advances for the Social Web, Web 2.0 and the Linked Data Web. These advances are discussed in terms of the latest capabilities that are available (or being made available) on the Web at the time of writing this paper. Such capabilities can be of significant benefit to teams, especially those comprised of multinational, geographically-dispersed team members. The specific context of coalition members in a rapidly formed diverse military context such as disaster relief or humanitarian aid is considered, where close working between non-government organisations and non-military teams will help to achieve results as quickly and efficiently as possible. The heterogeneity one finds in such teams, coupled with a lack of dedicated private network infrastructure, poses a number of challenges for collaboration, and the current paper represents an attempt to assess whether nascent Web-based capabilities can support such teams in terms of both their collaborative activities and their access to (and sharing of) information resources

Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science, and the Philosophy of Mind

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind

Using Windmill Expansion for Document Retrieval

SEMIOTIKS aims to utilise online information to support the crucial decision–making of those military and civilian agencies involved in the humanitarian removal of landmines in areas of conflict throughout the world. An analysis of the type of information required for such a task has given rise to four main areas of research: information retrieval, document annotation, summarisation and visualisation. The first stage of the research has focused on information retrieval, and a new algorithm, “Windmill Expansion” (WE) has been proposed to do this. The algorithm uses retrieval feedback techniques for automated query expansion in order to improve the effectiveness of information retrieval. WE is based on the extraction of human–generated written phases for automated query expansion. Top and Second Level expansion terms have been generated and their usefulness evaluated. The evaluation has concentrated on measuring the degree of overlap between the retrieved URLs. The less the overlap, the more useful the information provided. The Top Level expansion terms were found to provide 90% of useful URLs, and the Second Level 83% of useful URLs. Although there was a decline of useful URLs from the Top Level to the Second Level, the quantity of relevant information retrieved has increased. The originality of SEMIOTIKS lies in its use of the WE algorithm to help non–domain specific experts automatically explore domain words for relevant and precise information retrieval