New ways of scientific publishing and accessing human knowledge inspired by transdisciplinary approaches

Inspired by interdisciplinary work touching biology and microtribology, the authors propose a new, dynamic way of publishing research results, the establishment of a tree of knowledge and the localisation of scientific articles on this tree. ‘Technomimetics’ is proposed as a new method of knowledge management in science and technology: it shall help find and organise information in an era of over-information. Such ways of presenting and managing research results would be accessible by people with different kinds of backgrounds and levels of education, and allow for full use of the ever- increasing number of scientific and technical publications. This approach would dramatically change and revolutionize the way we are doing science, and contribute to overcoming the three gaps between the world of ideas, inventors, innovators and investors as introduced by Gebeshuber, Gruber and Drack in 2009 for accelerated scientific and technological breakthroughs to improve the human condition. Inspiration for the development of above methods was the fact that - generally - tribologists and biologists do not see many overlaps of their professions. However, both deal with materials, structures and processes. Tribology is omnipresent in biology and many biological systems have impressive tribological properties. Tribologists can therefore get valuable input and inspiration from living systems. The aim of biomimetics is knowledge transfer from biology to technology and successful biomimetics in tribology needs collaboration between biologists and tribologists. Literature search shows that the number of papers regarding biotribology is steadily increasing. However, at the moment, most scientific papers of the other respective field are hard to access and hard to understand, in terms of concepts and specific wording.

💡 Research Summary

The paper tackles two intertwined challenges of modern scientific communication: the overwhelming volume of publications and the persistent silos between disciplines. Drawing inspiration from the limited overlap yet deep conceptual commonality between biology and micro‑tribology, the authors propose a novel publishing and knowledge‑management framework built around two core ideas: a “Tree of Knowledge” and a method they call “Technomimetics.”

The Tree of Knowledge is a hierarchical, graph‑based representation of all scholarly domains. At the root lie broad categories such as natural sciences, engineering, humanities, and social sciences; each branch subdivides into sub‑disciplines, topics, and finally leaf nodes that correspond to individual articles, patents, datasets, or other research artefacts. Every item is annotated with rich metadata (DOI, authors, keywords) and linked to an ontology that captures its conceptual position. By storing this structure in a graph database, searches can go beyond simple keyword matching to exploit taxonomic relationships, temporal evolution, and cross‑disciplinary proximity.

Technomimetics extends the traditional notion of biomimetics. While biomimetics typically transfers biological principles to technology in a one‑way fashion, Technomimetics envisions a bidirectional loop: emerging technological trends are continuously mapped onto the Tree, and the system automatically discovers biological analogues that could inspire further innovation. This dynamic coupling relies on natural‑language processing, text mining, automated ontology mapping, and similarity scoring across the graph.

A central motivation is to close the three “gaps” identified by Gebeshuber, Gruber, and Drack (2009) between ideas, inventions, innovations, and investors. In conventional publishing, each stage resides on a separate “island,” making the flow of information fragmented. By embedding each stage as a node on the Tree, the framework creates a seamless pipeline: an idea appears as a leaf, is linked to an invention node, which in turn connects to an innovation node, and finally to investment opportunities. This continuity is expected to accelerate technology transfer and reduce the time from concept to market.

The authors illustrate the concept with biotribology, a field where tribologists study friction, wear, and lubrication, and biologists investigate living systems that exhibit extraordinary tribological performance (e.g., insect pads, plant surfaces). Currently, researchers in each community struggle to locate and understand the literature of the other due to divergent terminology and publication venues. The Tree would place a tribology paper and a related biological study side by side, linked by shared concepts such as “surface micro‑structures” or “adhesive forces,” thereby enabling rapid cross‑pollination of ideas.

From an implementation perspective, the proposal builds on existing open‑access metadata standards (Dublin Core, schema.org) and integrates with established bibliographic services (CrossRef, PubMed, Scopus). The user interface would feature an interactive “knowledge map” where users click on a branch to load the latest publications, patents, and data sets, while simultaneously visualising connections to adjacent branches. Such a visual, semantic navigation tool is intended not only for interdisciplinary researchers but also for policymakers and venture capitalists who need to assess emerging technology landscapes at a glance.

The paper acknowledges several practical challenges. Designing and maintaining a comprehensive, accurate taxonomy requires substantial expert effort and continuous curation. Automated NLP pipelines risk misclassifying papers, especially when terminology diverges sharply across fields. Data privacy, copyright, and the need for open‑access policies add further complexity. Consequently, the authors recommend an initial pilot limited to a few well‑defined domains (e.g., biotribology, materials science) to refine ontology mappings, evaluate user experience, and quantify the added value before scaling up.

In conclusion, the Tree of Knowledge coupled with Technomimetics offers a visionary route to democratise scientific knowledge, foster genuine interdisciplinary collaboration, and streamline the journey from idea to investment. Its success hinges on the maturity of metadata standards, the robustness of AI‑driven semantic annotation, and the willingness of the scholarly community to adopt a shared, graph‑centric view of the literature. Future work should focus on pilot validation, ontology refinement, and the development of incentives that encourage researchers to contribute high‑quality metadata, thereby ensuring the sustainability of this dynamic publishing ecosystem.