Meme media and Topica architectures for editing, distributing, andmanaging intellectual assets

摘要

Computers are expanding their target of augmentation fromnindividuals and enterprises to societies. The augmentation of societiesnrequires a new type of media that can carry a wide variety ofnintellectual resources, replicate themselves, recombine themselves, andnbe naturally selected by their environment. They may be calledn“meme media”, since they carry what R. Dawkins (1976) calledn“memes”. An accumulation of memes in a society forms a memenpool that functions like a gene pool. When economic activities arenintroduced, a meme pool becomes a meme market. Meme pools and memenmarkets bring about the rapid accumulation of memes and require newntechnologies for their management and retrieval. This paper reviews ournR&D on meme media, meme pools and meme markets, and proposes annoverall vision to integrate them. It also proposes a new frameworkncalled `Topica' for organizing and accessing the huge accumulation ofnintellectual resources in our societies