Moving Knowledge is an initiative aiming at the development of a scientific visualisation repository, knowledge base and community. It takes on three main challenges.

Challenge 1 - Scientific Visualisations are only findable via general keyword search and hardly contain detailed further information.

Scientific visualisations are widespread over the internet with a wide variety of styles, quality and complexity and very often a lack of detailed annotation. So it is hard to find a visualisation that supports one’s specific communication objective; and once you find one it is hard to judge the scientific basis and the use of artistic license.

So, the first major goal is the development of a Repository of Scientific Visualisations for the benefit of the main expected user groups: science communicators, scientific visualisation creators and researchers.

Challenge 2 - Creators of scientific visualisations lack a dedicated community and knowledge base.

Creators of scientific visualisations share education and experience from a wide variety of fields and therefore belong to different, but all in all relevant communities. A dedicated, widespread scientific visualisation community does not exist, nor a place where they can network, find knowledge and communicate.

The second major goal of Moving Knowledge therefore is the development of a science visualisation knowledge base, and to contribute to the formation of a community, including platform for networking and discussion and an opportunity for collaboration and research.

Challenge 3 - The field of scientific visualisation lacks standards.

Due to the issues addressed under challenges 1 and 2, there are sparse standards in the field of scientific visualisation, including a lack of a common language and terminology, a data organisation structure, a data exchange file format, etc.

This will be addressed by creating a common language to describe and annotate scientific visualisation and agree on the most appropriate terms. More in the long term are the development of an file exchange format and a central database for the deposition of the data, where specific applications could be build via an API.

It is obvious that these challenges cannot be addressed by few individuals but require the collaborative effort of many. The prerequisite therefore is to bring together leading figures of the community to drive these efforts.

The figure below is a draft roadmap.

First on the agenda is the determination of the repository data points, using a number of case studies from popular resources, and the visualisation knowledge-base, both live on the Twitch stream and therefore with the opportunity to develop them together with community input, live or on the accompanying Discord server. Everybody is invited to participate and asked to distribute in their relevant networks.