The knowledge of 2012

Posted January 11, 2012 at 4:00 pm by Marijke Kasius in General.

At the end of the year, lists pop up everywhere: ‘Most important news items of 2011’, ‘Greatest hits’, ‘Funniest television moments’ and ‘Sportsman or politician of the year’. In the IT world a lot has been blogged and written about the developments of the previous year and especially about our expectations for the coming year. It seems that people always want to predict and ‘know’ things. We have an urge to increase our knowledge.

Not so surprising, for knowledge means power and power creates advantages. Knowledge is more than just information. It is a combination of information, experience and skills and you need to know how to use it. Acquired knowledge needs to be made explicit, be shared and discussed.  This can be done in various ways, using the right technological support for instance, thus entering the field of knowledge engineering.

The people behind WikiLeaks know all about this. They use their ‘knowledge’ as a threat and sometimes show proof of the seriousness of the matter. Just before the start of this new year, they made public certain credit card data, including Dutch data.

Yet knowledge engineering did not experience the breakthrough that was predicted by gurus many years ago, certainly not when compared to more visible things such as mobile phones and the internet. However, hidden from the outside world, knowledge engineering systems are being used more and more. Think of the advert cookies at the top of your Gmail page, which are displayed only moments after you sent an e-mail on that particular subject.

At one point knowledge engineering and knowledge management or storage if you will, crossed paths. And in the course of time two forms of knowledge storage were created. First an unstructured, spontaneous database in which knowledge is transferred to the digital world. A great example of this is Wikipedia: this phenomenon keeps on growing, inviting you to share knowledge and make it available to everyone.

‘Wikiwiki’ is a Hawaiian word and means ‘fast’. ‘Wikipedia’: fast information to be used straight away. During the last few years, it has become normal for anyone to be able to gather information and acquire knowledge. Picarta and online encyclopaedias once were only available on university networks, not accessible to the public, but we now have numerous online locations we can use to acquire knowledge. Anyone can access this information, and anyone can add information.

Second, there is an increase in structured locations where knowledge can be acquired, databases that are managed centrally and form the source of business processes. An IT company with ISO certification cannot exist without a wiki page. Without our knowledge base we are nowhere. All information is stored in this knowledge base to ensure that we can display the right information in the blink of an eye, with just one mouse-click, so we can face any challenge.

What will knowledge engineering, the power of having or distributing knowledge, bring us in 2012? I frankly have no idea and I will not be tempted into producing a forecast.

I wish you all the best for 2012. Spread the knowledge!