[Mindjack Release] October 29, 2003

[Donald Melanson]

Mindjack Release
October 29, 2003
http://www.mindjack.com
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In the latest Mindjack:

Deconstructing Knowledge:
Trends from KM World 2003
by Nicholas Carroll

I was puzzled the first time I read about "knowledge management." How can
you manage knowledge -- much less shuffle it around an organization -- when
knowledge is a construct in an individual mind? People in information
science and neurobiology were of the same opinion: you can manage
information, but not knowledge. Knowledge is something that lives between
your ears. It has to be reduced to information to be organized, stored, and
transmitted.

For years the distinction was so clear that technical people didn't bother
to make it, and often used the words knowledge and information
interchangeably. Perhaps that was a mistake, because with growing talk of
"the semantic web", and the increasingly popular
data>information>knowledge>wisdom paradigm, it helped open the door to
masses of late 1990's social engineering consultants hyping knowledge
management as The Next Big Thing.

They had no shortage of allies. Visionaries of all manner charged the
ramparts, armed with natural language processing, algorithms, topic maps,
and ontologies -- everything but experience.

>>continued at: http://www.mindjack.com/feature/km.html