Mauri Kaipainen
Professor, Interactive Knowledge Environments, Tallinn University
Taggin' Tallinn concept. Blending geographical and experiential coordinates of a city by means of soft ontologies.
This paper describes the concept of the starting Taggin` Tallinn project (TT). It is an urban laboratory of public content contribution and sharing, virtual community software and game design in a locative framework. It builds on virtual communities, positioning techniques and a special kind of metadata termed soft ontology, designed to support multiple perspectives to a domain of information.
The core idea of TT is to enable citizens and visitors of the city (players) to publish and share their place-associated contents. This takes place in the framework of content-focused virtual communities with content-related activities such as elaboration, peer-evaluation, competition or games. Each community constitutes a dimension of meaning, which is treated as an element of the hybrid geographical and experiential coordinate system, that is, the ontological space of the city. This space is visualized on each player's mobile device screen as a map of "my Tallinn", seen from her individual perspective, manageable in real time with a special interface. This is used as a combined geo-experiential navigation aid and as a content browser to guide other players to share the meanings of the city. The hybrid geo-experiential space suggests a mixed-reality sense of immersion: Players browse the experiential city by concretely walking on the streets of the physical city.
Rather than a single project, TT is a conceptual and technological framework that facilitates a range of subprojects, each with its own content and interaction concept, community rules, solutions of production, sponsorship and promotion. The project involves the city, universities and several commercial agencies and aims at promoting the Tallinn cultural capital year 2011.
Mauri Kaipainen works as p rofessor of new media at Tallinn University and as an affiliate researcher at the Center of Knowledge and Innovation Research, Helsinki School of Economics. He studied education, musicology and cognitive science at the University of Helsinki and earned his PhD 1994 from the same university. His approach to interactive media is based on the view to cognition as explorative multi-perspectival activity of the embodied mind in its material, social and informational environment. He uses bottom-up metadata, or "soft ontologies" and nature-like computational models as his core methodologies for knowledge environment projects that are configured in various cognitive, social, locative and narrative setups.