Building an Intelligence Infrastructure for Science

A Guest Post from a couple of scientists from the Thomas Kuhn Foundation, created to "give science the means to see itself". They've created "a working system that can map how knowledge changes in real time... KGX3 detects and classifies the epistemic function of research papers... provide a complete understanding of what a paper does: confirm, stress, or break a paradigm... allows any institution to ask a profound question: What is happening inside science right now?... turns epistemic activity, the process of thinking and discovery, into structured information".

It's delivered as an API because "scientific intelligence should be a shared utility, not a private asset", and has a governance model "to protect science itself from the distortions of short-term commercial pressure". They hope it will create "a new kind of cooperation across the research ecosystem:

• Funders can identify early signs of stagnation or opportunity
• Universities can align teaching and investment with emerging paradigms
• Publishers can see when a field begins to reorganize its own foundations and adjust accordingly.
• governments can use epistemic data to guide policy — supporting areas of conceptual renewal before they reach crisis."