Re: Looking for the information

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2157

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-08-26 18:22:40

Three components are mainly addressed by knowledge management applications: 1) finding things you know you have; 2) knowing that you have something worth finding; 3) organizing the material for a writing or some other specific purpose.

For the first purpose, indexed searches are usually adequate, but I think they break down with enormous databases. How big? I don’t know, but the internet seems clearly too large. An indexed search of the internet will often not suffice for finding one particular needle in that haystack.

For the second purpose, an indexed search will often not be effective. For this purpose a program like InfoHandler and Zoot seem excellent: facet analysis or contexually activated material.

Once you find what you need, you have to structure it. A separate program may structure the material , as long as the first program can export to the structuring program. But if you’re working on a long-term project, you might do restructuring and revision as you go, so there’s a definite efficiency for that kind of work in combining the structured finding and restructuring capabilities.

The main structuring tool is the outliner. This topic begs for a comparative analysis of the virtues and infirmities of the Zoot and outliner approach.

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