Effective scientific collaboration using modern web technologies

Norbert Wiener, in his 1948 landmark "Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine"

"For many years Dr.Rosenblueth and I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. Since Leibniz, there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower."

Wiener shares Dr. Rosenblueth's solution to this problem:

"Dr. Rosenblueth has always insisted that a proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbours; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another’s intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague’s new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look."

I see a great opportunity in applying cybernetic principles to science itself to help form these teams and help them in gaining and maintaining a productive collaboration. The practical side would involve modern web technologies as used in social network sites, but also a sophisticated though easy to use knowledge documentation and aggregation system using semantic web technology and automated reasoning.