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| Organizing knowledge practicing the semantic web |
Writing in progress. Request for comments.
By: Jonas Bosson
The better we communicate knowledge, the faster we can reach out with our ideas. One way to communicate more effective is organizing information using a learning or knowledge perspective. A knowledge perspective means that we use informative descriptions for terms, processes and other important objects in our own field. Descriptive information gives you an advantage from the very start since it is an intuitive and dynamic navigational instrument.
Knowledge organization is as simple as to group information into:
Descriptions are documents describing processes, products, places, people and ideas, in short a knowledge base without the dialogue, or the synthesis of descriptions in the organization. Everything else is communication, until it is used ate or add descriptions into the organizational knowledge. Descriptive texts are used as our "organizational brain" and sum of structured experience.
This is pretty basic, so you might wonder: What's new?
We can now use documents, semantics, references, authoring and versioning and other standards from the web to implement this openly. It will simplify, not only one application or even your network, but the entire web.
Until now, we had to use specialized databases and structures to describe even tiny subsets of knowledge. This limited our abilities to adapt structures created by applications or systems. Take the file system as an example; it is organized for handling information from one given perspective only. When we create more, and more, folders and documents, the folders become a heap of disjoint categories that are hard to search and understand. If we would enforce strict rules on the folders, we would end up limiting work or destroy our ability to adapt to outside changes. So we need something else, a descriptive way of navigation - and this is where we use our descriptive documents to catch up with experience.
The web also allows us to share descriptions, this makes it easier to communicate since the context or descriptive framework can be shared and even combined in cooperation with others. Descriptions can be used or learn or understand communication. What we have learned is that learning is a part of communication, and that learning or change is in fact the weakest point in any computer application, unless the application can work on top of the descriptive framework.
Some application developers argue that people just don't understand complex systems. I think the problem is that most complex systems don't understand humans.
Gathering or writing what you do or what the core elements in your organization are, to a reasonable extent, is not that hard and also quite useful. The next step is to see to that the description can be identified using a standard URI. This is important because we want documents to reference the descriptions (internally or externally) by one standard to avoid confusion.
There are different sets of descriptions are common and often essential for the communication context. These are:
? Relations; customers, partners, employees, roles, groups etc. Using the standard LDAP
? Errands; accounting, complaints, other tickets etc. Using special URN or OSS /BSS-standards/XML
? Knowledge, simple descriptions written in text, preferred standard is HTML or XML
Information needs identification to create references and this is important since without:
So, see to it that your present system uses standards and can share identities and information. This will avoid gaps in systems and in relation with customers or partners.
The organization must learn quickly, without the pains of using odd applications or complicated routines. So you need to find the best method of allowing updates and changes of descriptions.
Writing in progress / Jonas