Cooperative development of a classification of knowledge management functions
Sentences, paragraphs, and books never provide sufficient precision to achieve efficient, shared understanding of complex domains of knowledge. Every time you read a treatise about a complex domain, you create a new, slightly different understanding in your own mind. And when two different people read the same treatise, their understandings may be very different indeed. The bigger the domain — and the more information there is available about the domain — the more interpretations will differ, often offsetting the value of added information.
Knowledge management itself suffers from this pandemic problem of our knowledge-based economy. The lack of common terminology and shared understanding of key ideas inhibits a reasoned discourse among practitioners and theorists of knowledge management. It inhibits rapid development of much-needed solutions for the most pressing business problem of our times. It makes business managers reluctant to adopt knowledge management solutions of any kind, no matter how well conceived.
And it recalls the embarrassing paradox of the cobbler’s shoeless children.
The solution: classifying the functions of knowledge management
That paradox can be eliminated only by creating a formal classification of knowledge management business functions — by deconstructing the overall domain of knowledge activities into component concepts and the semantic relationships among those concepts. This effort should be guided by the experience of the knowledge organization community, the classification and library science experts who have proven the value of their work to us all our learning lives.
As information has expanded in other disciplines, a shared classification system has become vital to the continued growth and refinement of knowledge in those disciplines. For example, in medicine the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) classification system helps researchers, practicing physicians, and medical information specialists organize and find vital medical information. A similar classification scheme has been proposed for music — yet another vast and diverse domain of knowledge.
Although the classification community does not have all the answers, techniques, and tools we need, it is already addressing many of the critical issues of knowledge management, as indicated by the topic of the most recent ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) conference: "Knowledge Organization and Change."
The need in knowledge management goes beyond bibliographic concerns. The benefits in these early years of knowledge management include sense-making, precision of meaning, and more rapid product development and implementation.
So we at Knowledge Praxis are proposing a project to develop such a shared classification system — a road map to the key ideas and the relationships among those ideas in the complex domain of knowledge management — and we invite you to join us, in whatever capacity you feel appropriate.
This project needs a basic model of objects and relationships, a shared methodology, expertise in knowledge organization practices, (with luck) some appropriate tools, and lots of contributors who enjoy sharing their own knowledge in a common effort.
But most of all, this effort needs an advisory board. Good systems of classification arise from review and approval by subject-matter experts. At minimum, we need experts from the realms of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and expert systems, organizational management, document management, publishing, and knowledge organization itself.