A Knowledge Yin-Yang Ontology

By Juan Chamero
Third of the series about a New Knowledge Management Paradigm

In this Yin-Yang monad two realms are facing each other, the Websites Realm in black and the Users’ Realm in green, in our Web ontology the Established Knowledge Realm or K-side versus the People’s Real or K’ side respectively. As any Yin-Yang monad en each Yin (black region here) there is always some Yang seed and in each Yang (green region here) there is always some Yin seed, represented by K in black within a green circle in the Yin side and by K’ in green within a black circle in the Yang side.

In our Yin-Yang Vision we represent the Web space like a monad where two complementary realms are continuously interacting: The Websites’ Realm and the Users’ Realm. This monad resembles the man-machine system and the network “Client-Server” philosophy.

The whole human information and knowledge content hosted in the Web is the Yin part, cold, obscure, infinite, deep, ordered, open, offering, relatively permanent, conservative, the feminine of the Web space. People are the Yang part, hot, vivid, finite, shallow, unordered, individually closed, demanding, relatively impermanent, revolutionary, the masculine part.

All Yin has something of Yang and all Yang has something of Yin: K are those concepts (that with some subtle differences and as a first approach could be assimilated to keywords) the content deal with, the Yin part meanwhile K’ are also those concepts that people either consciously o unconsciously use in their interactions. K is the Yang “seed” of the Yin evolution meanwhile K’ is the seed of the people ordering. Yin side is like a fossil, the legacy, and the old that has, from time to time, to be renovated. Yang side looks like chaotic even having its own order hard to see, and has to be ordered as seen form the Yin side.

Using a thermodynamic analogy we would dare to say that the black region needs to evolve from time to time (and for that it needs a seed of change) and conversely the green region needs some ordering from time to time (and for that it also needs a seed of ordering). As we will see later K may take the form of a Map of the Human Knowledge, the core of the “Web Thesaurus”. Conversely and symmetrically K’ may be synthesized as the People’s Thesaurus.

Between both sides we may imagine something like a thin membrane; an active interface that separates two entities that are in fact behaves like only one. The skins of all beings of course belong to each of them but may also be considered a single massive skin for the sun energy cycle. So this “skin” belongs to both: all beings and the sun. We are going into more detail about this specific “e-membrane”.

Note: In Far East philosophy the process of change named the “Virtue of Tao” is indivisible. For example the fight is necessarily a game of two, you and your adversary that continuously flow along the time, along the process of fighting but evolving as an indivisible unit. We as Westerns see fighting as a dual process instead, a process where one has the victory and the other fails. Zen see this process as the change along the time of the “self”. For a Zen practitioner any “fight deserves your maximum level of awareness and of course trying to win and the same your adversary but the final outcome, no matter how it affects you as a winner or as a looser, is accepted as a wise teaching of the self. Cyberspace is seen as a particular self, a particular scenario of change where energy (Chi) is continuously transformed in knowledge via man as a multitude acting in two roles, either as a Website owner/administrator or as a user.