  There is no escape from the expansion of information, so that structuring and
locating meaningful knowledge becomes ever more difficult. The question of how
to order our knowledge is as old as the systematic acquisition, circulation,
and storage of knowledge. Classification systems have been known since ancient
times. On the Internet, one finds both classifications and taxonomies designed
by information professionals and folksonomies based on social tagging.
Nevertheless, a user navigating through large information spaces is still
confronted with a text based search interface and a list of hits as outcome.
There is still an obvious gap between a physical encounter with, for example, a
librarys collection and browsing its content through an on-line catalogue. This
paper starts from the need of digital scholarship for effective knowledge
inquiry, revisits traditional ways to support knowledge ordering and
information retrieval, and introduces into a newly funded research network
where five different communities from all corners of the scientific landscape
join forces in a quest for knowledge maps. It can be read as a manifesto for a
newly funded specific research network KnoweScape. At the same time it is a
general reflection about what one has to take into account when representing
structure and evolution of data, information and knowledge and designing
instruments to help scholars and others to navigate across the lands and oceans
of knowledge.
