Inspired by interdisciplinary work touching biology and microtribology, the
authors propose a new, dynamic way of publishing research results, the
establishment of a tree of knowledge and the localisation of scientific
articles on this tree. 'Technomimetics' is proposed as a new method of
knowledge management in science and technology: it shall help find and organise
information in an era of over-information. Such ways of presenting and managing
research results would be accessible by people with different kinds of
backgrounds and levels of education, and allow for full use of the ever-
increasing number of scientific and technical publications. This approach would
dramatically change and revolutionize the way we are doing science, and
contribute to overcoming the three gaps between the world of ideas, inventors,
innovators and investors as introduced by Gebeshuber, Gruber and Drack in 2009
for accelerated scientific and technological breakthroughs to improve the human
condition. Inspiration for the development of above methods was the fact that -
generally - tribologists and biologists do not see many overlaps of their
professions. However, both deal with materials, structures and processes.
Tribology is omnipresent in biology and many biological systems have impressive
tribological properties. Tribologists can therefore get valuable input and
inspiration from living systems. The aim of biomimetics is knowledge transfer
from biology to technology and successful biomimetics in tribology needs
collaboration between biologists and tribologists. Literature search shows that
the number of papers regarding biotribology is steadily increasing. However, at
the moment, most scientific papers of the other respective field are hard to
access and hard to understand, in terms of concepts and specific wording.