Improving knowledge-creation and post-graduate education in science and medicine by means of webpendeons and meta-links

A Compendium is a scholarly publication that is a concise, yet comprehensive, evaluation of earlier work. This Article describes ways to efficiently create knowledge to be stored in Web-based Compendia. The amount and rate of Knowledge-Creation with presently-available Knowledge-Tools does not keep up with the Information-Expansion that occurs with expanded scientific and academic activity. Two issues contributing to this failure are inefficient Knowledge-Tools and insufficient numbers of human Knowledge-Compenders. WebPendeon Software will create and manage a WebSite to be used by a group of experts, in a highly-moderated special forum, to create new Knowledge by WebPending published literature about a Narrow-Topic, into an open-access online Compendium, in a MultiLevel Format. "WebPending" means Compiling, Compending, Combining, and Compacting prior literature. Repeated WebPending creates Knowledge in forms needed for easier training. The Open-Source Software described here will have considerable and immediate impact on Science and Medicine, with regard to: efficiency of Knowledge-Creation, and quality of Post-Graduate Education. The project has been designed so that it does not need continuous funding, and will make the future Web, by itself, a complete self-sustaining Knowledge-Repository that can be used more efficiently than the present Web. Open-Access WebPendeon-WebSites will be initiated and controlled by self-nominated Moderators (primarily those in Post-Graduate Education [Science and Medicine] ). Over time, a WebPendeon will dynamically change and be repeatedly peer-reviewed (post-publication). The WebPendeon/Compendium MetaData will automatically attribute Authorship of contributions and then create, save, and transmit a Chained Hash Number in the MetaData to authenticate authorship which will make plagiarism, should it occur, provable. When no longer active, the Compendium will ultimately be placed in a ActiveArchive in which the content is aging, but the MetaData is up-to-date about newer publications that have cited the ActiveArchive's content. Today's "passive" Archives can be transformed into more valuable ActiveArchives by means of the Open-Source MetaLink Software. Software for new MetaLinks will improve WebLinkages from/to each Compendium and WebPendeon. A MetaLink is a WebLink with considerable MetaData collected for Readers, conforming to the new MetaLink-Protocol, and will provide enhanced WebLinks that are available directly on a given WebSite. Unlike present "backlinks", all MetaLinks will be from Sentence-to-Sentence, even when forwards-in-time. The MetaData will contain data known to be of interest to Readers because means are provided within the Protocol for adapting the MetaData-Categories to the different needs of different fields, or to the changing needs in a changing field.