Managing research knowledge in distributed communities: two approaches to augmented Web infrastructures

Research knowledge has interesting characteristics that pose particular knowledge management challenges for distributed communities. Although in constant evolution and of uncertain status, research ideas are often highly structured in the form of documents, and authors formulate contributions using relatively stable genres of scholarly discourse legitimated within their communities of practice. The paper describes and contrasts two approaches to assist communities in publishing and interpreting ideas. In both cases, we are focusing on supporting scholarly discourse by providing augmented World Wide Web infrastructures. The first (relatively mature) approach generates discussion spaces from a document's structure, whilst the second approach (under development) provides a semantic hypertext infrastructure for modelling literature-wide perspectives based on researchers' claims about their own work, and that of others. We conclude by discussing how these systems address persistent problems facing systems that require users to structure information.