A Global Knowledge Medium as a Virtual Community: The NetAcademy Concept

Abstract

Taking up the ideas of the ancient Greek concept of Academia, the ?NetAcademy? is aiming at providing a knowledge medium to aid in the creation, integration, reviewing and dissemination of domain-specific knowledge in the scientific community. In pursuit of these goals it is taking full advantage of the unique characteristics and potential of the Internet medium. The NetAcademy is an existing web information system (WIS) which was developed in order to support the building of virtual scientific communities for different research fields.