No one knows everything, but everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity[1]

While the notion of collective intelligence –as coined by Pierre Lévy- has already been extensively discussed in regards to the collective phenomenon of Wikipedia, the current rise of the social use of information visualisations should also be seen in this perspective. While Pierre Lévy described how individual members of online communities combined their individual knowledge in order to create a shared expertise (collective intelligence),[2] he could not envision the collective use of data. The unanswered question posed by Lévy as to ‘…[how we will] be able to process enormous masses of data on interrelated problems within a changing environment?’[3] might have found its answer in the collective potential of information visualisations…