title: The dynamics of meaningful social interactions and the emergence of collective knowledge.
abstract: Collective knowledge as a social value may arise in cooperation among actors whose individual expertise is limited. The process of knowledge creation requires meaningful, logically coordinated interactions, which represents a challenging problem to physics and social dynamics modeling. By combining two-scale dynamics model with empirical data analysis from a well-known Questions &Answers system Mathematics, we show that this process occurs as a collective phenomenon in an enlarged network (of actors and their artifacts) where the cognitive recognition interactions are properly encoded. The emergent behavior is quantified by the information divergence and innovation advancing of knowledge over time and the signatures of self-organization and knowledge sharing communities. These measures elucidate the impact of each cognitive element and the individual actor's expertise in the collective dynamics. The results are relevant to stochastic processes involving smart components and to collaborative social endeavors, for instance, crowdsourcing scientific knowledge production with online games.
authors.affiliation: 1] Department for Theoretical Physics, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia [2] Scientific Computing Laboratory, Institute of Physics Belgrade, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia.
authors.forename: Marija Mitrović
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Dankulov
authors.affiliation: MS2Discovery Interdisciplinary Research Institute, M2NeT Laboratory and Department of Mathematics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Roderick
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Melnik
authors.affiliation: Department for Theoretical Physics, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Bosiljka
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Tadić
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D060756:Social Networking; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014584:User-Computer Interface