Abstract. Collective intelligence is most often understood as group intelligence which arises on the basis of intelligences of the group members. This paper presents an overview of application of collective intelligence methods in knowledge engineering and in processing collective data. It also introduces papers included in this issue.
Keywords: Collective intelligence, intelligent systems, knowledge engineeringCollective intelligence is most often understood as group intelligence which arises on the basis of intelligences of the group members. On the one hand, Newell [19] defined an intelligent collective as a social system, which is capable to act, even approximately, as a single rational agent. On the other hand, Lévy [11] understood collective intelligence as an intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals; an intelligence that seemingly has a mind of its own. These definitions refer to cognitive systems. From the computational and artificial intelligence point of view, we can think about a collective as a set of autonomous units working on some common task, for example, a multi-agent system. We can say that the collective is intelligent if it can make a use of the intelligences of its members for solving some problem, for example, a decision making problem. are based on the collective intelligence aspects and which use the computational techniques for solving these problems. Regarding knowledge engineering, computational collective intelligence provides methods and techniques for determining the knowledge of a collective as a whole on the basis of collective members' knowledge. The need for processing collective knowledge is quickly increasing because of the very fast development of Internet, social networks and distributed databases. It is obvious that knowledge originating from autonomous sources for the same subject is very often inconsistent. Therefore, the aspects of inconsistency processing and integration computing are very important.Knowledge engineering [9] plays a relevant role in CCI since it is necessary to use its techniques in order to represent individual information. In fact, there are studies advocating that scientific knowledge is essentially collective knowledge [23]. In this line, recent studies state that it is very important that different individuals provide orthogonal, highly unrelated, and possible contradictory knowledge to the collectivity. In other words, "the higher the inconsistency, the better the quality of collective knowledge" [20]. Another relevant interaction