Knowledge communities: Digital infrastructure for your thirst for knowledge.
Knowledge communities: digital infrastructure for your thirst for knowledge Wikipedia is great, isn't it? YouTube too, so much freely available, understandable knowledge on absolutely any topic. You just have to find it. And that's the catch, because while hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily sort knowledge on Wikipedia, we don't have anything like that for videos and podcasts - not yet, as Tim will show you.
Curriculum vitae.
Tim is 29, newly married and lives near Paderborn. He also studied computer engineering there and completed his doctorate for 8 months before moving to Lower Saxony to continue his doctorate at LUH, closer to the centre of knowledge. Using the Open Research Knowledge Graph as an example, he is researching here with the TIB how we can communicate, store and share knowledge across all areas and media. Tim's biggest construction site is the non-profit organisation "BorgNetzWerk - Gesellschaft zur Vernetzung freien Wissens e.V.", which was founded a year ago by 12 people who share a vision: To make tangible knowledge more available to everyone.
To achieve this, Tim takes every possible route: From Paderborn to Hanover to work with the digital infrastructure experts. To Karlsruhe and Wolfsburg for science communication, whether in workshops, talks or many conversations at and around the events. While the Science Slam at phaeno is the first real slam for him, he already has experience with smaller talks about his work at conferences such as KGC Hannover, GPN Karlsruhe or TPDL Ljubljana. Last but not least, the 64 videos on the BorgNetzWerk YouTube channel are also a constant exercise in breaking down knowledge into useful information and making it usable for others. Anyone who sees Tim in a video, in an interview on the Weltverbesserer podcast or in the reviews on the BorgNetzWerk site will see him building castles in the air with "sincere passion" and "sober determination", which in 5-10 years' time may be as commonplace for science communication as Google, YouTube or Wikipedia are today.
Research and work.
His research focusses on data science and digital libraries. To be more precise, with scientific communities, the interplay of digital knowledge infrastructure and curating people. Tim's first international publications in Digital Libraries have recently been published, and two of the research proposals he has developed together with e.g. Wikimedia Deutschland or Reflecta will follow soon. At the L3S research centre (LUH/TIB) in Hanover, he is working on the Open Research Knowledge Graph. From there, he also works in the SE²A Cluster of Excellence at the Technical University of Braunschweig. It's always about making knowledge "FAIR": Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (reusable)
The fact that even Wikipedia provides a link to the definition of "interoperable" shows that these concepts of (research) data processing are not easy to understand and certainly not commonplace. That's why, in addition to aerospace engineers, there are so-called "knowledge engineers" who operate "knowledge management" - so that, for example, not every engineer has to build every aircraft from scratch. Or every scientist has to read every paper themselves. And it is precisely this knowledge management that Tim is researching, not for rocket scientists, but for you. So that you have a navigation system at your side that takes you to the WissKomm video you are looking for. The first results are already bearing fruit: "Tim, the founder of the network, was able to use automatic voice recognition to produce transcripts for audio interviews I have been doing over the last decade and more, leading to an invaluable resource for users of my podcast website." Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy podcast is a first demonstrator of the castle in the air on which Tim hangs his research. "You do what you love because you can," says his wife, who showed him the podcast.
