H2 {The Agora is a Social Knowledge Graph} [[Flancian]]

In this chapter we describe an Agora, being a social knowledge graph provisioned and maintained by a community as a commons.

The Agora differs from other projects in the knowledge space in a few ways: whereas a personal knowledge graph usually contains resources authored or collected by a single person, and a wiki usually contains resources produced by a group, an Agora contains and integrates both personal and group resources and interlinks them liberally. Whereas links in a personal knowledge graph or wiki usually have a single target, Agora links fan out by default and can be thought of as mapping to sets of resources. Finally, the reference Agora tries to remain tool, format and platform agnostic, trying to build first on general conventions common to many tools and platforms in the knowledge space for maximal inclusivity and diversity.

Being a graph, an Agora can be defined as a set of vertices or nodes N (entities) and edges E (known links between entities, optionally annotated). An Agora node contains the set of all known resources about or otherwise relevant to the entity described by the node title or any provided metadata. Each such resource is called a subnode. Note that because links can be arbitrarily annotated (i.e. #tagged or qualified by other nearby links) and have multiplicity, the Agora is in fact a hypergraph.

The free and open source reference Agora provides a minimum viable implementation of the underlay, interlay, overlay components of a distributed knowledge graph based on off-the-shelf components. Individual Agora instances are expected to federate and organize into a greater Agora network. We describe how this network can integrate with the wider internet ecosystem and how it could be used to run experiments on distributed thought.

• an [[agora abstract]].
  • #push [[agora abstracts]]
    • #pull [[social knowledge graph]] [[distributed knowledge graph]]
    • An Agora is a [[distributed knowledge graph]] provisioned and maintained by a community as a [[commons]].
      • The Agora can be said to be a [[social knowledge graph]] as it is a [[distributed knowledge graph]] produced in a social context and containing social information.
      • Whereas a [[personal knowledge graph]] usually contains resources authored or collected by a single person, and a wiki usually contains resources produced by a group, an Agora contains and integrates both personal and group resources.
      • Whereas a [[personal knowledge graph]] is usually maintained using a single [[personal knowledge management]] tool and stored in a single format, an Agora tends to be tool and format agnostic, trying to provide and follow the most general conventions.
    • Being a [[graph]], an Agora can be defined as a set of vertexes or [[nodes]] N (entities) and [[edges]] E (known links between entities, optionally annotated).
      • Agora [[nodes]] are defined by the set of known resources about the entity described by their title or other metadata.
        • A [[node]] is a community-maintained [[collection]] of voice-preserving individual [[subnodes]] defined by the resources contributed by a certain user or group.
      • Because links between two nodes in an Agora can be [[annotated]] (i.e. #tagged or qualified by other nearby links) and have multiplicity, the Agora is in fact a [[hypergraph]].
      • Individual agoras are expected to federate and organize into greater Agora networks, which are in themselves graph-like at a higher level.
    • On a system level, there exists a [[free]] and [[open source]] [[reference Agora]] that provides a minimum viable implementation for the [[underlay]], [[interlay]], [[overlay]] components of the [[distributed knowledge graph]].
      • In the reference Agora, links can be said to [[fan out]] by default in the sense that they are evaluated in social context in individual contributions (resulting in following a link sometimes surfacing more than what the individual author envisioned.)
      • We are using said reference Agora to refine the proposed system and run experiments.
      • Some hypotheses that we are testing:
        • Individual contributions can be made maximally useful to others on average when served best-effort in a social context at the only cost of adopting a default social stance (at little extra effort over baseline), and this mechanism benefits from network effects.
        • A [[knowledge commons]] model can provide utility to participating communities efficiently, as the cost of systemic integrations with a hub design such as the Agora can scale with O(N) instead of the O(N^2) provided by a naive full mesh.
        • Best effort social [[composition]] and [[integration]] of notes might be sufficient to surface yield higher level meaning and order, or at least significantly complement both taxonomic approaches (hierarchical) and individual-scoped eventual convergence (non hierarchical).
          • A composition of personal [[hierarchies]] yields a social [[heterarchy]].
          • The social context afforded by an Agora provides a path towards faster eventual convergence (that is, K people contributing to N nodes as categorized using loose or implicit personal ontologies can converge on useful emergent categories as K increases, at low individual effort).
        • Going from a set of voice-preserving [[individual contributions]] to a shared [[group resource]] might be an efficient way to foster opportunistic collaboration at scale.