Topic Merge Scenarios for Knowledge Federation

Climate change is a growing concern to humankind, since the dominant view argues for rapid, significant changes in human behavior to avert catastrophic consequences. This is a complex problem, known as a wicked problem. A productive way forward is through creative, critical dialogue. Such dialogue requires new kinds of sociotechnical infrastructure. We offer a socio-technical infrastructure, described as a boundary infrastructure, based on improvements to existing and emerging Issue-based Information Systems (IBIS) conversation platforms. IBIS is an emerging lingua franca of structured discourse. We report on a core function in that boundary infrastructure: the topic merge architectures of topic mapping frameworks. We use two scenarios known to exist in our research platform to develop a novel merge architecture that supports virtual merges of topics.