Category: Uncategorized

Irrational Knowledge Value Models in Practice
At a knowledge interest group meeting today I experienced a microcosm of so many of the issues here.

(1) The “General Motors / DeLorean effect” A failure of formal project teams to achieve scope execution and objectives desired and understood by the individual members, despite admissions that each member individually knew the process was wrong. “We’re creating a monster”. Committees of highly competent people often make incompetent decisions – fact.

(2) Recognition that the bits of the group’s activities that do work and represent “value” are those based on mutual trust and communication links between the members, not any formally planned activities / projects.

(3) Recognition that the “intangible” value of the loose / collaborative activities is real, but very difficult if not impossible to reflect in project budget cost-benefit justifications – yet still agree valuable enough for members to continue to work to achieve.

(4) “Darwinian” nature of the current state of development of semantic web ideas – memetic no doubt. Almost random which mutations occur and which find an immediate local environment to prosper, compared to any objective analysis of which ideas are “better” in any broader sense. (Just look at some of the trivial projects which achieve IST funding !)

Conclusion : Knowledge is organic. Processes which create and manage it must be organic too. Models which characterise and value it must recognise this. Objective rationalisation destroys knowledge. (Another one of those inescapable, but unfortunately currently useless, facts – like the emperor’s suit of clothes.)

SWAP – Semantic Web & Peer to Peer
I knew it. The power of peer to peer thinking fits so well with exploiting relationships between ontologies embedded in “knowledge” at each user in a peer to peer network. (Reference from Graham Moore of Empolis. Of course Empolis is part of Bertelsmann group who acquired Napster technologies over a year ago ! Guess what that technology is going to be used for.)
See earlier logs below eg “We Enterprise ?” (3:57 Sunday May 26, 2002) and the Corporate Klogger thread below too ….
Still need a “shared” ontology which is sensitive to the context and behaviour of the peers (individually). Where so much of the semantic is in relationships between peers and their activities, RDF is the obvious candidate for modelling those resource links. (Could RDF type XML Meta-Data actually be arranged so that it grows adapts organically / memetically according to the behaviour / usages of the peers, without a centrally managed ontology for the knowledge – a killer concept.)
Amsterdam Univ Presentation on IST Projects incl SWAP
Amsterdam Uni Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Page
Balearics Technology Innovation abstract on SWAP
Ontoprise SWAP presentation at CNEC

Think Lean Learning – link from Leon

Message to self.
So many important resource links now embedded in the body of the blog, I’m going to have to go through and re-build a fixed links section – I keep re-discovering links I already have.

I’m a Klogger apparently. Link from Leon.
I’ve been running this KM-Blog for almost a year now, and now I find someone has just coined the phrase Knowledge Logging, keeping a “K-Log” of knowledge fragments. Link is to an article that exploits Microsoft Sharepoint to capture (say) employee blogs of knowledge with Sharepoint meta-data to capture structure in (say) a coporate knowledge base. Powerful idea, if the taxonomy of meta-tags can handle the true semantics. I’m already on this case. No time to lose.

There is a Kloggers forum too, run by John Robb of Radio Userland in the US
And there is KnowledgeBoard edited by Helen Baxter in the UK

More Rationally Institutionalised Conspiratorial Motivation
Another link via Jorn from Common Dreams
Quote
Mr. Cheney also specialized in getting government contracts for the firm. During his five years as CEO, Halliburton got $2.3 billion in contracts, compared with $1.2 billion in the five years before he took over. Most of the work was done by Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root, the construction firm, thus reinstating a fine old Texas tradition. Brown & Root was Lyndon Johnson’s major money source: It was to LBJ what Enron was to George W.
Unquote
(Not news, in fact my thread is that there is nothing new under the sun in this line of apparent endemic conspiracy, but this particular example strikes a chord with me personally because of my longstanding relationship with one of B&R’s major competitors. I should explain – the “conspiratorial” references are not part of some conspiracy theory thesis against big business and the establishment – just part of a long series of threads of observation on relevant aspects of human nature – all will become clear.)

Everybody lies, nobody minds.
Eureka link via Jorn

Speaking of my Reading List, as I was a little earlier.
Message to self – Also must restart the Nietzsche thread. Struggled with the biblical style of Zarathustra, but was taken with the contemporary notes by Ludovici, and need to follow-up via earlier Nietzsche works.
And speaking of literary style – I’m struggling with Melville again – the chapter (54) of “The Town-Ho’s Story” written as the narrative given verbally to “a lounging circle of Spanish friends” including Pedro and Sebastian – complete with asides, incidentals and interruptions in what is itself an aside from the main story – tough going to maintain the plot here. A 20 page chapter too, unlike the other 135 which are mostly between 3 or 6 pages each – roll on chapter 55.