Meme media and Topica architectures for editing, distributing, and managing intellectual assets

Computers are expanding their target of augmentation from individuals and enterprises to societies. The augmentation of societies requires a new type of media that can carry a wide variety of intellectual resources, replicate themselves, recombine themselves, and be naturally selected by their environment. They may be called “meme media”, since they carry what R. Dawkins (1976) called “memes”. An accumulation of memes in a society forms a meme pool that functions like a gene pool. When economic activities are introduced, a meme pool becomes a meme market. Meme pools and meme markets bring about the rapid accumulation of memes and require new technologies for their management and retrieval. This paper reviews our R&D on meme media, meme pools and meme markets, and proposes an overall vision to integrate them. It also proposes a new framework called `Topica´ for organizing and accessing the huge accumulation of intellectual resources in our societies