The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.
Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future as:
Social search
having the ability to notify, share and improve / refine search results become available.
Shared desktops
Teams wish to synchronize the structure of their file folders and those of colleagues – making retrieval easier.
Intuitive navigation
Firms seek to provide access to content using visual tools, enable
the location of related items, give a user-friendly browsing
experience. This is greater enhanced if the staff share a set of key
concepts and issues.
Some of the tools to do this are appearing:
* Topic maps – an emerging XML standard to assist data display, sharing ontologies and depicting relationships
* Visual browsers – open source code to map sites, display searches, navigate wiki and hypertext webs
* Concept mapping – practices for knowledge construction, learning and conceptualization
The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.
Imagine if you
wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts
to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later
search and browsing – Now that would really assist content sharing!
[Knowledge-at-work]