A structure:
Every person involved with knowledge needs to have some background or
awareness in structuring information. We structure to be able to search
and find, to reduce the number of terms we work with to a manageable
number, to be able to navigate, to collect common meaning, to show
relationships.
Structuring is so basic we often are not aware it is going on. This may
take the form of heuristics, rules, patterns, mental models or be the
categories we view the world from, or simply a list to focus attention.
Structuring adds focus, generalization, abstraction, preference (order of
terms), provides sanction to certain symbols.
Structure can be expressed by association: i,e, semantic, spatial,
temporal, or affinity / proximity, by show the hierarchical connections
and captured in a meta statement. Interestingly enough I hear very little
about structure, ontology development, visualization or clustering in the
more recent KM literature. We are seeing some interesting tools which can
cluster automatically and adjust the link strength depending of useage
How do you personally keep track?, reduce the many items that float over
your desk?, keep your cognitive system within bounds?
Ontologies
We each have a private ontology, it consists of our preferred categories,
names, the way we see the world. Now if we could find a way to share those
insights we could improve communication, look for gaps, explore
opportunities and search for synergies.
How do you approach your private ontology?, do you have one all embracing
world view or many domain specific categories that require you to change
hats as you move from community to community or when entering a different
subject area?
I have been looking at ontologies around KM tools and see this a useful
way to do in-depth technology comparisons.
http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?KmOntology
What ontologies do you subscribe to? often we are bind to our fundamental
categories and classifications, they slip beneath our radar in stealth
mode!
[Host's Note: Greetings Denham! ..Rick]
--Denham Grey <dgrey@iquest.net>
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