I have a favor to ask: (01)
In the day job I help maintain and develop a system called the
knowledge base at Indiana University: (02)
http://kb.indiana.edu/ (03)
It's been developed over the last 10 years or so from a set of
files on a VMS machine, through a gopher server, into a fairly
static web server, to its current incarnation, known as KB3: a
database driven system containing questions and answers that has
two primary aspects: (04)
* a presentation engine and search interface
* tools for managing the content (05)
Of late people who like to go to conferences and stuff have taken
to calling the system a knowledge management system as that's
more fully buzzword compliant. (06)
I take issue with this because people have different expectations
of a knowledge management system (KMS) than they do for a knowledge
base (KB). When people run off calling a KB a KMS other people
come back and say "make it do such and such" because they think
there is a KMS available. As one of the developers of the KB,
this mis-marketing often leads to me getting screwed ("I don't
care if its not a boat, make it float!"). (07)
I've been asked to construct a document that describes what a
knowledge base is and what a knowledge management system is, and
thus infer how our system is not a kms. (08)
It turns out I'm rather struggling to articulate this. This is
where you people come in. Do you have an opinion? What are the
characteristics of each? Is there a different? Why does it
matter? (09)
My own feeling is that a knowledge base is a necessary condition
for a knowledge management system but is not sufficient. (010)
A knowledge base is, to my mind, a collection of explicit
knowledge made accessible. And perhaps the tools to manage (011)
--
cdent@burningchrome.com http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/mt/
"The accepted official version of anything is most likely false
. . . all authority is based on fraud" - Kenneth Rexroth (012)
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This message is archived at: (013)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=tools-yak&i=Pine.OSX.4.53.0312151716060.1402@ks-64-151-174-59.kspot.kiva.net (014)
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