Basically, I'm thinking of finding and/or building a massive connection network within the world of Psychology, where someone can search for all the current research being done in that domain, and all of the past research (accessible by keywords, categories, terms). In addition, this network would list all of the researchers and professors, listed by important criterion such as areas of expertise and resources available to them. Then, people interested in a certain branch of research would have the ability to see who else is working on this area, who else is available to work on this area, what has already been found in this area, etc...

The point, essentially, is to be able to link the entire domain of Psychology, past - present - to future, in order to produce bigger innovations and faster attainment and application of findings than ever could be done before. It would be a catalyst to moving the entire field forward at a tremendously fast pace.

======= Date Modified 29 Oct 2012 14:27:23 =======
they call it collective intelligence.

u're gonna need to study artificial intelligence, ontology, computational linguistics, search technology, profiling and the list goes on.

the thing is, it CAN'T be maintained manually. it's gonna be too massive and messy. unless, u've got *agents* to do it for u. for instance, how would u rank experts? unlike a forum that estimates expertise based on the total number of messages posted, in the real world that may not be entirely accurate.

so the network must be intelligent and self aware. else, it'd just list tonnes of experts without knowing which one is critical in a particular situation. i heard that google and facebook are racing against each other to solve most of the problems related to ur idea.

however, if u're just interested of building a non-intelligent network similar to "academia", wouldn't it be more convenient to build upon what they have already done?

i do hope this is not your phd topic. it's gonna be too big to be done in 3 years. :)

Sounds very ambitious. Potentially useful, though I'd be concerned about taking a project like that on as an individual. Who knows what Research Gate or other platforms might be dedicating whole teams to working on right now?

If you do decide to pursue it, I'd suggest acquainting yourself with the concepts of 'linked (open) data' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data