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”.

Here’s where documents relate to knowledge management, knowledge ecologies, and knowledge economies…

When intended so to do, the documentary content marked up in XML (topical, explicit, specific, precise, and unambiguous) becomes more efficient for knowledge storage, knowledge processing, and knowledge transfer than any particular document which may encapsulates it from time to time. Each topical content object within the document has been made more individually accessible, is more individually self-descriptive, has been elevated in individual importance, and ultimately it individually costs more to produce.

The “first-use document” (as a contextual wrapper for a collection of expensive topical objects) normally costs more than a document which has been encoded typographically (visual, implicit, general, inexact, and ambiguous). But, each subsequent document costs remarkably less, while it retains the complete utility of each topical content object it encapsulates.

The first pillar of knowledge management — primum non nocere — First, do no harm: Start to eliminate future harm by reducing spending on non-topical, non-explicit, non-specific, imprecise, and ambiguous documents, and replacing it with increasing investment in topical, explicit, specific, precise, and unambiguous essential content objects.

Come back soon for more pillars.

Category: General