I was engaged for several weeks on a commercial document publishing project, which exhibited the normal elements of “critical schedule, high complexity, limited budget, conflicting technologies, and parochial infighting”. They are normal elements; they are not necessarily handled well in most projects.

Which got me thinking and philosophizing…. Why is success [in anything] so rare? Why is failure [in everything] so common? Can “the odds” be predictably beaten? Etc.

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I just got back from my high school reunion, Union Endicott High School Class of ‘71. I grew up in Endicott, NY, where I went to school with the same kids for 13 years. Kinda like “That ’70s Show”, except we didn’t have FES!

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For the past few years, the concepts of knowledge cores have been useful to my clients and those other people whom I have influenced. As revealed in the previous post, I use a specific utility definition for the term knowledge, which deals with an explicit asset form of what people know:

Knowledge is a collection of content, contexts, and relationships that expresses topical meaning with sufficient fidelity to meet the consumption needs of a user and/or the processing needs of an agent.

Now we get to talk cores. By considering some of the most essential characteristics of knowledge assets, we address and begin to solve some of most vexing issues of creating and sustaining knowledge economies.

Most definitions of knowledge are not very useful when it actually comes time for people to do something with knowledge, such as its accumulation, sharing, processing, or management. It turns out that the act of well-defining knowledge itself is difficult. So the second pillar of knowledge management is to have a useful working definition of knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

Last post’s first pillar of knowledge management may appear only to be relevant to authors, and therefore to publishing organizations that control their own creation phase of their own complete content supply chain. In fact, I’ve been told that to adopt Pillar One is contrary to traditional and conventional wisdom in commercial publishing, and economically unsound for that domain. But, I’ve seen and experienced the opposite, and together with certain publishing company senior managers and executives, we force the evolution of their organizations’ traditional views, conventional wisdom, and craft-based processes. Read the rest of this entry »

How is re-engineering documents in XML a pillar of knowledge management? Let’s revisit both, using straightforward models, possibly idealized, based on my experience and assumptions.

XML markup is meta-data which is topical, explicit, specific, precise, and unambiguous, used to describe document content. Typographical clues are meta-data which is visual, implicit, general, inexact, and ambiguous, used to describe document content. During document production, applying XML markup rather than applying typographical clues becomes the content-organizing value-add of the author or editor. In either case, with regards to the document content, whatever the author/editor “knows and expresses” becomes impersonally deliverable to a consumer who “needs to know”. Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking about a post topic when I noticed it was XML’s 10th birthday, which makes it also SGML’s 20th birthday. I’d been involved with SGML since 1989 (when it was a toddler). By 1994, I had several staff who would help to conceive XML, then participate in its gestation, labor, delivery, and upbringing. Read the rest of this entry »