The human species can be defined by its special ability to manipulate symbols. Each great augmentation in this ability has brought enormous economic, social, political, religious, epistemological, educational (and so on) changes.

I think that there has been only 4 of these big changes. The first one is related to the invention of writing, when symbols became permament and reified. The second one corresponds to the invention of the alphabet, indian numerals and other small groups of symbols able to represent "almost everything" bycombination. The third one is the invention of the printing press and the subsequent invention of electronic mass media. In this case, the symbols werereproduced and transmitted by industrial machines. We are currently at the beginning of a fourth big anthropological change, because the symbols can now be transformed by massively distributed automata in the digital medium.

My main hypothesis is that we still did not have invented the symbolic systems and cultural institutions fitting the new digital medium. So my research in the past 15 years has been devoted to the invention of a symbolic system able to exploit the computational power, the capacity of memory and the ubiquity of the digital medium.

This symbolic system is called IEML, for Information Economy MetaLanguage. It is :

(1) an artificial language that translates itself automatically into natural languages,

(2) a metadata language for the collaborative semantic tagging of digital data,

(3) a new addressing layer of the digital medium (conceptual addressing) solving the semantic interoperability problem,

(4) a programming language specialized in the design of semantic networks,

(5) a semantic coordinate system of the mind (the semantic sphere), allowing the computational modeling of human cognition and the self-observation of collective intelligences.

The development and use of IEML could lead to an epistemological revolution in humanities and social sciences (facing currently a flood of "big data"). It could also become an important tool in the hands of human communities to create, assimilate and "manage" knowledge. All this goes in the direction of an augmentation of human collective intelligence linked to a generalized continuous social learning.

I have explained the philosophical and scientific principles behind IEML in "The Semantic Sphere" vol 1 (Wiley 2011) See: http://pierrelevy.posterous.com/the-cover-of-my-book-the-semantic-sphere-in-e , and I am currently writing the volume 2 that unveils its linguistic and mathematical aspects. There are currently no tools, and even less "killer apps". My research is still at a fundamental stage.