A Taxonomy for Knowledge Management

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2267

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-10-16 14:20:49

I think knowledge management tools are best categorized on a continuum, the salient points on which and representative programs being:

1.Recording essential decisions about a writing or product , organizing, and building on them, in other words, brainstorming and analysis. BrainStorm (http://www.brainstormsw.com), NoteMap (http://www.casesoft.com)
2.Organizing the parts of a complete writing. Lonely Notes, Writers Blocks, outline view in Microsoft Word.
3.Recording and organizing background material along with the material to be included in writing or directly relevant to a project. Miss Lonely Notes (http://www.mindola.com), Writers Blocks.
4.Creating a large and ever-expanding knowledge base, e.g. for all of oneís professional activities. Idea! Professional Edition, Personal KnowBase, generic database trees such as HyperClip.
5.Creating a knowledge base for a group or just a still larger knowledge base. Idea! Enterprise Edition, MDE InfoHandler , Zoot!

This dimension is one of increasingly broad focus of the product, starting with a core of central information and structural decisions about a project. Moving top to bottom, the focus is increasingly from transparency of operation and each of radical restructuring to searching and structuring to find. One implication of this scheme might be that redundancy increases when programs are close to one another on the continuum. By hypothesis it makes little sense to use BrainStorm and NoteMap for a single project. (I use NoteMap to format a BrainStorm model, but selecting a $150 program to assist a $70 program would not have been frugal.

Stephen R. Diamond

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