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| Knowledge Management Will Drive Next Innovation Cycle |
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posted by Editor on Monday April 19, @06:28PM
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This editorial in the New York Times (free registration required) projects that the next major IT innovation cycle will be based on the industry's evolution from management of data to the management of knowledge, represented by value added to raw data in the form of metadata (i. e. "data about data") which is produced by human analysis and categorization. As storage gets ever cheaper and network bandwidth increases, the gap between the amount of information that computers can process and users can consume will continue to grow. In this environment, metadata becomes an increasingly valuable resource, potentially surpassing the value of the data itself. Knowledge management tools such as search engines are instrumental in creating and organizing metadata. The article describes the fundamental debate about the correct way to represent knowledge, and reviews the leading players in pursuit of knowledge management systems, including Google, Microsoft (which has two approaches: the new file-retrieval methods in its delayed Longhorn OS, and the currently available OneNote option), and various independent developers, including askSam, BrainStorm, Chandler, Enfish, InfoSelect, iRider, Lookout, Onfolio, TheBrain, and Zoot.
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This discussion has been archived.
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by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 23, @02:37PM EST (#1)
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Hey do any of you guys use these products listed in this article? Great article, by the way.
I've used theBrain before, but after using these others I've never used, I think I quite like Zoot. It has pretty decent functionality, but I can't seem to get the Web item to open a browser.
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by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 23, @03:44PM EST (#2)
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askSam - free form database, designed for users rather than programmers. you can search on the contents of fields, and you can search on free-form text. while most databases use clearly defined fields, like name and address, askSam allows you to store complete documents in a database - regardless of structure. you can create hyperlinks to connect pieces of otherwise separate information. the new release also lets you search for documents with attachments.
BrainStorm - a thinking and planning aid that helps users capture and arrange information and ideas. a BrainStorm model is a single file, like a text document or an image file. its contents may include entries (notes, thoughts, text, etc.) on a wide range of subjects or on a very specific focused topic. it is a free-form collection of paragraphs (or sentences, or words) which may be linked in different ways according to your mood and the stage of development of your information. it can be a single list or a hierarchical structure. a model is a collection of entries. each entry can have any number of sub-entries, and they can have sub-entries, and so on, and so on. an entry can be up to 64,000 characters and can contain multiple paragraphs - useful for lines of a poem or a song, for example. normally an entry would contain a line, a sentence or a paragraph. your choice.
Chandler - an open source personal information manager for email, calendars, contacts, tasks, and general information management, as well as a platform for developing information management applications. it was developed by Lotus co-founder Mitch Kapor, who claims to have coined the term Personal Information Manager (PIM) in the 1980's. because Chandler users can easily share information with others, it is pitched as the first "Interpersonal Information Manager".
Enfish - automatically indexes and cross-references every document that users encounter, including e-mail messages, attachments, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF files, etc. it can also search portals, document management systems, and more. using the index, users can associate data with different contacts, companies, and projects.
InfoSelect - a Personal Information Manager that helps users manage all their daily random information. has only three commands - create Note, create Topic, and Search. can find any data regardless of where or how it was entered, including random notes, ideas, e-mail addresses, contacts, plans, numbers, web page addresses, configuration notes, or anything else. it also has a Palm version. the company also offers DiskMapper which visualizes disk space consumption.
iRider - visual representation of web sites that users visit. claims to liberate you from the limitations of the browser's Back/Forward buttons and website links. you can fly around a visual map of all the pages and sites you're working with by dragging through the Page List to riffle through pages, just like flipping through a magazine. may be useful for comparing products on a shopping site, flipping through search results, and referring quickly to sets of pages.
Lookout - plug-in for Outlook that provides fast search capabilities to your mailbox. you can use Lookout to search your email, attachments, contacts, calendar and filesystem. searches huge personal email stores in seconds as opposed to using Outlook's search which takes minutes. users no longer have to file their old messages. everything just goes to either "deleted" or "archived".
Onfolio - plug-in for Internet Explorer that makes it easy to collect links, pages, text snippets, and other information from the Web and save them on your computer. the Collection Explorer lets you access, organize, and search the information you gather from within the browser.
TheBrain - helps you organize all your Web pages, contacts, documents, e-mails and files in one place so that you can always find them — just like you think of them. you can even find related items that you worked on but forgot existed. it uses an interactive network graph tool to visualize and browse the relationships between information.
Zoot - treats information has mass. as information collects over time, its mass increases. Zoot's storage model ensures information is spread across an unlimited number of individual database files so that the information remains manageable over the long term. it provides a process for collecting, reviewing and labeling raw information so that it can be found quickly and easily, prioritized and classified and viewed in meaningful timeframes and contexts. it accepts information from many sources, including e-mail, the Web, and CD-ROM. Users review and label the data in order to make it readily available for future reference.
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I tried Zoot 4.0 but found it very complex.
It doesn't help, that the documentation comes in Zoot documents. So you have to know how to handle Zoot to find out how to handle Zoot.
An item may be assigned to different "folders", which basically is fine. But if the concept is totally different to the usual folders in hierarchical trees, why are they still called "folders"?
You can assign keywords to items. But I didn't find any place, where these keywords could be useful (besides exporting them to Outlook).
Michael
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Author of bookkey - Bookmarks by Keywords.
Which is my suggestion for future information handling. It introdues a new way to handle a large number of keywords.
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