Towards Solving the Interdisciplinary Language Barrier Problem

Abstract

This work aims to make it easier for a specialist in one field to find and explore ideas from another field which may be useful in solving a new problem arising in his practice. It presents a methodology which serves to represent the relationships that exist between concepts, problems, and solution patterns from different fields of human activity in the form of a graph. Our approach is based upon generalization and specialization relationships and problem solving. It is simple enough to be understood quite easily, and general enough to enable coherent integration of concepts and problems from virtually any field. We have built an implementation which uses the World Wide Web as a support to allow navigation between graph nodes and collaborative development of the graph.