Media Centric Knowledge Sharing on the Web 2.0

The success of knowledge sharing heavily depends on the capabilities of an information system to reproduce the ongoing discourses within a community. In order to illustrate the artifacts of a discourse as authentic as possible it is not sufficient to store the plain information, but also to reflect the context they have been used in. An ideal representation to do so is non-linear storytelling. The Web 2.0 in its “bi-directional” design therefore is an ideal basis for media centric knowledge sharing. In this article we present a novel solution to this issue by non-linear storytelling in the Virtual Campfire system. Virtual Campfire is a social software that allows a modular composition of web services based on a Lightweight Application Server in community engine called LAS. Hence, Virtual Campfire is capable of fully exploiting the features of the Web 2.0 in a comprehensive community information system covering web-services for geo-spatial content sharing, multimedia tagging and collaborative authoring of hypermedia artifacts.