Knowledge share

Sharing knowledge is one of the most important human activity. We could hardly keep our society without preserving, developing the knowledge we - as mankind - own.  There are several ways to do knowledge share. Here are short list of knowledge sharing tools:

The Traditional Way

People started on live in groups because so they could share tasks, combine their skills and so be more effective.  However it’s not possible if they don’t share their knowledge.  There are two basic ways of sharing knowledge; the first by using the knowledge for the benefit of others (for some – usually – material direct or indirect reward), the second is to teach others to things you know.  In the latter case the reward is often more indirect.  

The thing we call job, or work belongs to the first category, Books, teaching, practice, conferences are in the second category . Work groups are somewhere in between.

Books

Historically using books for information access got widespread only at the end of XIX century.  Before that it was only a privilege of a selected few. Up to now books are the most used source of information.  For a physical storage media they have relative large capacity, mobility, are durable, easy to handle and usually give a nice feel. On the other hand compared to electronic media they space requirement is large, they are relative hard to search and read only; it’s hard – albeit possible – to add personalized content to them .

Teaching

Teaching is a more tradition way of knowledge share, actually it exists since the beginning of mankind.   Teaching is very effective (more effective than books) mostly because it has immediate feedback, can be tailored to the people receiving knowledge, and it’s easy to combine with other methods; books, exercises....  However personalization is what limits the power of teaching; with the number of participants its effectiveness is declining, it needs infrastructure, and participants have to make an effort to be at the same place in the same time. It also requires constant alignment and concentration form pupil and teacher (you can set a book aside if you e.g. feel tired, a lesson will be lost if you can’t concentrate).

Practice

Learning  by doing is very effective if a tutor can support the process.

Conferences

Conferences are very similar to teaching with the difference that it’s usually about new, not yet settled knowledge and the share of knowledge is more two way. The presenter not only wants to share what she has found, developed, concluded… but also is interested in the feedback of the audience.

The Modern Way

eBooks and electronic publications

Electronic books are the next generation books. Nowadays everybody – who has some valuable topic to write about - can compose a document and publish it in practically any format.  

The other point is that a eBooks could and should deliver more than a “normal” book.  It can be put in context i.e. reference to other materials, text, videos, dictionaries, thesaurus, the user can add and share his comments, notes and bookmarks.

In other worlds content enrichment is key element in digital publications; this is an important added value compared to traditional publications.  The following content enrichment methods and tools are feasible:

• References: links to other documents, publications, websites.
• Dictionary: in a narrow sense it’ allows interpreting, translating and exploring words found in the text. In a broader sense it allows to navigate through a thesaurus and explore a broader set of related documents.
• Search: a good solution would not only look up terms in the document itself but look for results also in the referenced documents.
• Similar documents: look for similar documents, web pages… etc.
• Text/Data mining: a clever algorithm could find keywords, concepts, assessments and data in the text. This would help to formalize intrinsic knowledge and also give good feedback to the author.

Distant learning

Distance learning is – in may view – is very similar to traditional learning only that it’s able to break over geographical and time barriers.  Personal contact is and stays the most powerful way of teaching but it’s also very resource intensive (buildings, organizations, travel, administrative overhead…).  A good mixture of those can be the most effective way of learning. 

Software

Software in its core is nothing else than knowledge; structure, workflow, algorithms, rules… Plus content provided by the user(s).  The history of the last decades shows how powerful this concept is. However there is one serious difficulty; the implementation of knowledge is tedious, resource intensive and requires a programmers who must understand the knowledge to be packaged. That ‘s a major obstacle because sometimes even experts have difficulties to formalize they knowledge not mentioning to transfer it to professionals of another field.

What we would like to have is something like an application blog e.g. where a tax expert could not only write about the new tax calculation method but also publish a tax calculator for the purpose.

Web

It doesn’t make much sense to praise the importance of the Internet. Others have done it very profoundly and we all are aware of it. While the Web opens the door for easy publications and knowledge sharing for the masses it also raises questions concerning the deluge of information, credibility and security.

Blog

Blogs are a simple and easy way to share thoughts and follow events. However by nature blog entries are short, rather like a piece of news.  Blogs can raise interesting thoughts, questions, direct interest to a topic but can’t give deep knowledge.

Wiki

Wikis are probably the best way to collect knowledge in a certain area (see Wikipedia).

Website

A website is a complex thing, it can contain any kind of content or application.

The Twenty First Century Way

Semantic Web

The semantic web (sometimes called Web 3.0) is an aspiration to give dumb content a meaning. While a text on a web page has no meaning for the computer the semantic web can classify text, sentences or keywords, according to some classification. For example the sentence “Semantic web is a new computing paradigm.” has no meaning for a computer. However if you attach the classification “information technology” to it than computer will have an easier job to attach search results, related articles, user preferences to it.

The difficulty of semantic web is the construction of the semantics themselves.   First it puts a “burden” to the publisher who has to enter the semantics into the content. Second it needs a common understanding and structure of semantics (i.e. metadata).  I think that these obstacles also give the limits of the semantic web.  People publishing on Web will give keywords, labels and some metadata to their texts (or other content) but it’s not very probable that they will be able and willing to use a complex thesaurus for every word or other pieces of content their produce. Next I don’t think they will ever be a common thesaurus for every domains of knowledge. Rather there will be several different thesauruses for every domain it’s not very probable (and neither desirable) to have one single “structure of knowledge”.

And last the semantics will be produced by humans so it seems that we just push the problems to a higher level. If people would phrase the sentences more clearly no semantic web would be needed, search engines could retrieve the semantics without major difficulty. And actually this is already happening. (See for example: http:\\www.silobreaker.com).

To summarize the semantic web indeed makes sense, it would help to increase the value of content, improve knowledge share in certain domains significantly but it won’t bring a fundamental change in the way and efficiency we use the Internet.

Problem databases

Wikis (especially Wikipedia) are an excellent and very popular knowledge sharing tool. However it’s passive content only. What I would prefer is a Wiki which is also support algorithms in an uniform way. Such a database for example not only describes the traveling salesman problem but also implements the algorithm in a standard manner.

Publication platforms

There are plenty of web publication and content management platforms. However there are limited for work-groups and companies. We need something more open and common much like a social network.

Social networks

Facebook for example is almost inevitable in social life. If it's used to share information why couldn't it be a platform for knowledge share as well.