In the broadest sense knowledge environments may be defined as social practices, technological and physical arrangements intended to facilitate collaborative knowledge building, decision making, inference or discovery, depending on the epistemological premises and goals.
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Knowledge environments departing from constructivist epistemology assume that knowledge about a domain is built in and results from cognitive and/or social practices. From this point of view the primary purpose of knowledge environments is to host and support activities of knowledge building, the means including cognitive ergonomics, social software, immediate information access exploiting means of multimedia and hypertext, content contribution functionalities and structured ontologies. Wikipedia itself is prototypical example of a knowledge environment in this sense.
From another perspective, the purpose of a knowledge environment can be defined as to facilitate consistent knowledge outcomes. Knowledge outcomes reveal themselves as learning, communication, goals, decisions, etc. Consistent knowledge outcomes imply predictable learning results or replicable communication results and predictable quality of decisions. The design of knowledge environments is both commonplace activity and specialised expert work. At a simplistic level every teacher, every author, every librarian and every database manager is a creator of a knowledge environment. At a specialised level knowledge environments need sophisticated architecture and modeling capabilities. This is necessary when the creator of the knowledge environment wants to deliver replicaple results in hundreds of specific instances of the same knowledge environment. On the other hand, the strengthening trend of public authorship leads to open-ended ontologies by means of, say. tagging or folksonomies. In a significant sense, knowledge environments are in such cases created not only by their authors or owners but also by the contributors of their ontologies.
There are various kinds of knowledge environments:
Knowledge environments are all pervasive but difficult to build on a scalable and a replicable basis this is because of two groups of interacting variables:
Some of the issues in development are:
Knowledge environments are useful in many ways. They are useful for designing: