Ecosystems Knowledge

Introduction

The multiple modes of recognition and knowledge, by analogy, are inherent to any cognitive activity and to all thought.

Edgard Morin

It would be quite illusory to think that we could do without metaphor in order to qualify new objects.

Yves Jeanneret

This book presents the concept of the knowledge ecosystem from the point of view of the uses, theory and design of a platform for collective intelligence. The aim is to provide conceptual and computational tools with which we can analyze the complexity of information and communication through a generic modeling of info-communication existences.

The concept of the ecosystem is increasingly used to describe situations in which multiple actors have dynamic relationships. These include the ecosystems of digital economy or those of innovation. The Société française des sciences de l’information et de la communication or SFIC (the French Society of Information and Communication Sciences) is positioning itself within the field of digital humanities through the discourse of a “complex ecosystem”¹. However, to date, there has been no book that presents this concept in a detailed and critical way. Similarly, there is no book which deals with the use of this concept within a generic method of analysis of info-communication processes.

Nevertheless, the issue is important; it affects all individuals concerned with a “knowledge society” [LYO 79, COL 15], and especially with the intellectual technologies that can manage it [SAD ...