The Rhizomik initiative tries to use the rhizome metaphor as its inspiration when working with knowledge from a scientific, technological but also philosophical point of view. The rhizome serves as a metaphor for the multiplicity and infinite interconnectedness of all thought, life, culture, and language. It was developed by the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book “A Thousand Plateaus”.
The Web provided the rhizome approach to the information level, where the rhizome approach stands for a hierarchy less, open and decentralised way of organisation. This approach, applied to information, has showed as the best suited in an Internet-connected world. Therefore, the novelty, and the challenge, is to apply it to the knowledge level.
This metaphor has accompanied us in our research about knowledge in many different fields, fundamentally Semantic Web, Complex Systems and Cognitive Science. An example of this rhizomik inspiration is Rhizomer, although there are other projects and publications that share this inspiration.
Rhizomer constitutes the technological framework used to build up this semantic web portal. Rhizomer manages the RDF metadata underlining Rhizomik in order to semantically structure content (people, projects, publications,...). Metadata is rendered in the left frame and it is navigable in order to be self explanatory. Both metadata and ontologies can be navigated traversing the whole metadata graph by means of recursive pop ups.
This traversal is performed step by step. At each step a chunk of metadata is shown, where a chunk of metadata is constituted by a central resource and all the surrounding metadata that depends on it for its identification. This is to traverse the graph starting from this resource through all possible paths till identified resources of literals which includes all the intermediate anonymous resources. The metadata traversed (resources, properties and literals) constitutes the chunk of metadata. The leaves of the chunk are literals or resources, which can be navigated further by new chunks of metadata. This is quite rhizomik, isn't it?
Moreover, with Rhizomer it is also possible to edit this chunks of metadata and to create new ones based on existing chunks. You can test this feature in the SANDBOX:
Rhizomik