Organizing Knowledge

I thought that I would examine what other writers think of "organizing knowledge", since I chose this for the title of my blog.

My passion for this title comes from the need to meld business knowledge with IT infrastructure - organizing the business' inherent and (usually) implicit knowledge by first capturing it and then making it usable, accessible and actionable (within the IT infrastructure). There is another aspect to this also - taking lots of information (already in the IT infrastructure) and organizing it to turn it into knowledge (not just bits of data).

Given these two goals, you find (or will find) lots of postings about ontologies, business processes, semantic web and similar topics in this blog. (Also, you will occasionally find some riffs on digital natives and education - since these are of particular interest to me.) I will not repeat postings from my earlier blog (while I was at Microsoft). You can read these yourself at http://blogs.msdn.com/policy_based_business.

Well, back to what others think about "organizing knowledge". Most of the work in this space is related to organizing and cataloging library materials, since libraries were the main repository of knowledge, and books the main format up until this digital age. This has now all changed. The need to catalog and classify books, using a single scheme, in order to find a particular book on a particular shelf in a physical library building is no longer a primary driver. One would argue that it is not even an appropriate driver, in a fast-paced, online business environment. (However, I must confess to a passion for reading real, physical books, away from the electronic distractions of today's environments.)

Libraries had a need for a single, driving organizational scheme since they often only had a few copies of a book and could not have them scattered across many shelves, classified in different ways. Now, multiple classifications/organization schemes can exist and cross-reference each other.

Where before knowledge extraction was all manual ... someone had to read the books, examine the world, organize and build on the knowledge, draw new insights and conclusions ... we now have tons of data stored on our computers and on the Web, and the help of the semantic web and description logic reasoners. Notice that I said "the help of semantic web" - it still requires a person to classify, organize and query knowledge in valid ways, and to interpret the results. I am not close to advocating for or finding the HAL computer from 2001. :-)

So, back to what others think about "organizing knowledge". I did a search on "organizing knowledge" on Amazon. Here is what I found (all quotations are from the editorial reviews on Amazon):

• Organizing Knowledge (Jennifer Rowley and Richard Hartley) - "Incorporates extensive revisions reflecting the increasing shift towards a networked and digital information environment, and its impact on documents, information, knowledge, users and managers ... [offers] a broad-based overview of the approaches and tools used in the structuring and dissemination of knowledge".
• Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness (Patrick Lambe) - Defines and discusses various taxonomic forms and how these "can help organizations to leverage and articulate their knowledge"
• The Organization of Information (Arlene Taylor) - "Provides a detailed and insightful discussion of such basic retrieval tools as bibliographies, catalogs, indexes, finding aids, registers, databases, major bibliographic utilities, and other organizing entities"
• The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Elaine Svenonius) - Analyzes the foundations of information organization, and then presents three bibliographic languages: work languages, document languages, and subject languages. From the review, "The effectiveness of a system for accessing information is a direct function of the intelligence put into organizing it."
• Organizing Business Knowledge (Thomas Malone) - "Proposes a set of fundamental concepts to guide analysis and a classification framework for organizing knowledge, and describes the publicly available online knowledge base developed by the project, which includes a set of representative templates and specific case examples as well as a set of software tools for organizing and sharing knowledge"

As you can see, there is some interesting material out there, and some mundane stuff. I have ordered several of the books listed above and will report on them in future posts on this blog. Hopefully, the information will be of help to all of us.