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.

Contexts for the Applicable Meaning of Core

Concepts of core are extant in diverse technical and scientific disciplines. Each offers some insights into how and why cores are essential to knowledge economies. Here are a few of the most striking contextual concepts of core:

• In Archaeology – A Core is a distinctive artifact that results from a specific investigative process.
• In In Biology – The Core (of fruits) is the place where seeds are.
• In Computing – Core usually means primary storage regardless of platform or technology.
• In Economics – A Core is the set of allocations in an economy that cannot be improved upon by subset of the economy (analogous to a Nash equilibrium).
• In Education – Core is equated to essential (as in curriculum).
• In Executive Management – Core assets are the critical revenue-producing assets of people, property, and technology. (per IAFSB, Asset is defined as A resource controlled by the enterprise as a result of past events, from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the enterprise.)
• In Mathematics – The Core is the innermost set of objects in a group, usually invariant in their properties.
• In Nuclear Physics – The Core is the portion of a reactor containing the fuel.
• In Planetary Science – The Core is the densest innermost layer.

Tying these all together, knowledge cores can solve problems, generate revenue, and increase in their asset value, provided they are designed, engineered, and built to embody these (among other) characteristics:

1. Knowledge cores consist of knowledge components akin to seeds — previously elaborated as content, contexts, & relationships — all of which must be equivalent in their ability to be independently defined, created, identified, tracked, and used.
2. Each component in a knowledge core must be distinct in its properties, which are inferred from specific investigations into the properties needed to support consumers and agents. The properties of components and cores must be maintained as independent from and immutable by any other systems. All other such systems must be considered mutable and dependent on the knowledge assets.
3. Each component in a knowledge core must be continuously maintained at the highest fidelity possible. Dissonant material must be brought into consonance early, frequently, and completely to maintain fidelity. Arbitrary or regular opportunities to increase fidelity equate to asset enhancement, rather than equating to increased expense.
4. Each knowledge core must be considered as the primary source of raw material from which all other derivative products are generated via automated agent. Hand-crafting of derivative products (web pages, text, graphics, documents, RSS feeds, etc.) is deprecated in favor of an automated approach.

Now I think we have established some beginning footing for a third foundational pillar of knowledge management – Build and use knowledge components within knowledge cores to drive more revenue per unit of asset. I’ll elaborate later.

Come back soon and often …

Category: General