Knowing me, knowing you in Zurich

I travelled to Zurich for a workshop on social media. It was a requirements gathering exercise and I originally published two articles, on the sun/oracle blog, one on Zurich and one on some ideas which became the social graph. These ideas were presented by Bertolt Meyer of Humbolt University, Berlin, who has recently published research into the fact that Knowledge Repositories don’t work. Once he said it, it becomes obvious, have you ever found one that did. The key insight I took away was that we want to use knowledge management systems to discover authors and experts. Sun had also been struggling towards some of these ideas, I came across Joan Dimicco’s work, last year which I reported on here, on my sun/oracle blog, which I point to from this article, but for various reasons, didn’t bring forward to this blog.

Meyer and his collaborators insight goes beyond the view that the central data model consists of documents, activities, topics and most importantly people. It is necessary to transform the knowledge management system into a knowledge network consisting of people and their connections and reasons for connection. They have built an application proving these insights at ioe-skillmap.hu-berlin.de.

Interstingly the network visualisation functionality is delivered using prefuse, and the key data model insight is that the relationship between nodes possesses multiple attribute, particularly those of parent/child, simile/loose and vector.

We stayed in Zurich, within stone’s throw of the Hauptbanhof and the it was pointed out that Lenin used to drink in the Odeon bar, so I had to follow him. I’m not sure that the rest of the clientele know about their illustrious predecessor.

ooOOOoo