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Ask Slashdot: Knowledge Management Systems?
Tom writes: Is there an enterprise level equivalent of Semantic MediaWiki, a Knowledge Management System that can store meaningful facts and allows queries on it? I'm involved in a pretty large IT project and would like to have the documentation in something better than Word. I'd like it to be in a structured format that can be queried, without knowing all the questions that will be asked in the future. I looked extensively, and while there are some graphing or network layout tools that understand predicates, they don't come with a query language. SMW has both semantic links and queries, but as a wiki is very free-form and it's not exactly an Enterprise product (I don't see many chances to convince a government to use it). Is there such a thing?
Kinda offtopic, but bear with me. Enterprise grade is what closed source rolled out once they started losing sales to well maintained and stable open source projects. it comes with support contracts and licenses, but not much else. Just as many closed vendors will disappoint you with their support as open source. You could argue wikimedia is enterprise grade, because it supports 1.21 million accounts. but unless and until the business is committed to defining exactly what they mean by "enterprise grade" you have nothing to go on other than "software that requires a purchase order and recurring license"
that having been said, check out foswiki. search and control are all pretty good.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Just store a bunch of documents somewhere with a search feature that does full text indexing. Or use a simple Wiki system.
Anything more complicated than that and you'll be the only one using it. Other people won't care enough to spend their time entering data into specific fields and learning a query system.
Atlassian Confluence may be the thing you're looking for.
Is there an enterprise level equivalent of Semantic MediaWiki, a Knowledge Management System that can store meaningful facts and allows queries on it?
I asked my Knowledge Management System and it said that no, no there isn't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
SharePoint can do anything, and anything it can't do, just slap in a bit of jquery.
A big issue to be aware of for information management systems is the large training effort to use them and the effort to move your documentation into them. We have had problems that a new system is brought in. It takes literally a few years for employees to get their work in the new system and get comfortable with it - then a newer latest and greatest system comes out. We now have 20 years of documentation in half a dozen different places - each of those places originally declared as our "permanent solution".
You need to budget a lot of training and content transfer time. If you just hope it happens naturally, you will be very disappointed.
If you don't want to spend time and $ on training and moving documents, your best bet IS just files in a directory tree with a normal OS provided content search. If people use keywords in documents, that is good enough for 95% of all documentation uses, and its free.
The number one problem is at the input interface: People will only use it if it's useful or there is someone standing over them with a cosh. So how do you do that? By finding applications they find useful for their knowledge or sharing knowledge. Progress report, interface specs, requests for changes or whatever the knowledge generators want. So it's a management problem.
Say to management, "I have this as a solution, I think it's the most flexible, can we give it a try? Look! I've piloted it on my latest project and see what it can do... Think how useful if..." When management champions it there is some chance of it working. Until then paddle your own canoe and offer to show people how clever you are.
It's a good overall question, but exactly the same issues apply to 'Enterprise'(whatever that is) and novelists trying to keep track of places, people, timelines, todos, feedback etc. Until you've really put any solution (I've tried all sorts over 35 years and keep coming back to a book of notes or a master notes document.) to the test by actual use you won't understand the practicalities. The human brain is a pretty good filter if you can do basic organisation and remember to make notes/put things in the right place.
[quote]Sharepoint does that have search functionality. It is used for storing documents. Unusable for sharing information[/quote]
You have absolutely no idea what you're taking about. SharePoint is an amazing product. Also there are billions of dollars in development behind it and it's mature.
I have never seen an installation of sharepoint which was good for sharing information. It's probably possible to build something that people find usable with it, but it's like recommending a hammer and lumber to someone asking for a house.
(I don't see many chances to convince a government to use it)
The government uses a tremendous amount of open source software, I don't see any reason they wouldn't consider mediawiki? Plus, everyone's heard of wikipedia,it's a pretty easy sell: "You've used wikipedia right? We're going to use the same exact software that runs wikipedia - and it's free!"
I developed a large information based system recently and we used Drupal 7 and a plugin to push the content to OpenCalais which then tagged the content with the semantic info back into the drupal system. You can then use a faceted search which will allow you to drill down to your data.
Seeing as I've seen Tom reject every single suggestion anyone has had, I guess the answer to his question is "No."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
... Howtos + 5-minute Screencasts are what you're looking for.
Most KMSes/DMSes are crap - wether FOSS or not. Don't burden yourself with an extra system that is more trouble than use. Verbose opening comments of classes, API docs with examples, documented Usecases, double-checked by the users, Howtos and Screencasts are what you're need and want.
Once you've generated the final docs, give them a nice design, some search-thingy with elasticsearch or something and put the Howtos andd Screencasts Front and center along with some Intros for n00b users.
All that is done best with textfiles and API doctools + proper versioning. Perhaps some diagrams of archticture, setup and Main Usecases nicht help.
KMSes are the Fallout of 2000s mid-execs bullshit-bingo sessions and IMHO hardly ever worth the hassle.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In the title. Thank you and have a great day.
Even a basic wiki or any kind of system (let's say internal IM or some stuff to schedule when the meeting room gets used) may get approved, set up and then virtually unused. Or in stronger terms it will be unused.
e.g. the tags attached to slashdot stories. At least I've noticed that today clicking on them brings a list of stories (it used to not work I think). But it is likely that 80% of stories (or a lot more) that would warrant relating to a given tag are missing, and many tags were one-time snarky remarks. Now that they don't fail they do seem to bring very interesting content though.
Semantics technology seems ideal for e.g. a database of animal or botanical species with people paid to exhaustively maintain the data. Or a collection of towns, some "booming", some "decaying", some linked to others in a certain way?
Thus you may want to define some areas of knowledge where the semantical features will really be used more than in others, and somehow get it enforced through policy?
Looking at http://semantic-mediawiki.org/... there are a few examples that can definitely be considered enterprise users, including some high-risk government users (NASA uses it to plan EVAs for the ISS for example).
The "enterprise mentality" makes most of the alternatives too cumbersome to actually be effectively used - ultimately you have to have buy-in from you users, or what management wants is not going to matter - if it's not pleasant to use you'll be back to emailing 70 different versions of the same different Word document around in a few months time with file renames as your only version control (if you are that lucky).
http://protege.stanford.edu/ Java Desktop Application.,Used to define/manage ontologies. Not sure if they have a web version meanwhile and if comes close to what you need. However it supports plugins, perhaps the frontend can be adapted to access a centralized DB. Oh, found it: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/We...égé.html
This is a info page with an overview about various tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Did you stumble over this: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki...? Dozens of various tools mentioned.
Another tool, I stumbled iver, but did not use it yet: http://oboedit.org/
And then there is https://jena.apache.org/docume...
But that is more a programming API to dynamically create classes to store/manage data in an ontology described database. (Did not use it yet, but looks promizing)
And then we have this: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/To...
BTW, I can offer remote programming/assistance in such tools.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
you might want a tool storing claims in the form of RDF triples; these can be used as the basis for deductive reasoning. one standard in this area is the Web Ontology Language. several software reasoners are named in the wikipedia article. also, for existing knowledge bases, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language#Public_ontologies
Surely you just say something like... Look the cost is in the staff who you already have, it's Open Source and sits on top of an Open Source application, it's free, the platform to host it is either free or low cost commodity, plenty of people use it already (proven technology), it'll look good that the government is investing time not necessarily money from tax payers and it's using Open Source and Open Standards, so you're not tied into some niche technology only supported by a select few large corporation that when things go wrong give you zero support or guarantees (contrary to the contract). That last one is just my rant from an experience I've had already when I failed to convince a company to use Open Source and things went south big time.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
There was a discussion on Slashdot a couple of months about a more sophisticated file system.
In my opinion we should extend file systems instead of replace them because users and support staff are used to them and their stuff is already there.
If file systems easily allowed meta data to be attached to files and folders, then semi-structured queries etc. could be done on them. "Views" could be made of combinations of folder trees, similar to RDBMS views. Rough example:
While there is an existing standard on file meta-data, it appears inconsistent across vendors/OS/versions, poor support by file API's, and poorly tested.
I'm thinking of adding a secondary system on top of the file system to store meta-data rather than depend on vendors' meta-data. I have a rough-draft for an open-source product. (It won't be very fast, but if it catches on, optimizers could be added.)
It could also serve light-duty CRUD, such as specialized tracking systems.
Table-ized A.I.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/softw...
SharePoint doesn't support true semantic metadata. All your documents would have to be HTML and you would need a separate tool to add the RDF markup.
So, this is based on the current sharepoint installation at a Fortune 25 company.
Automatic notifications of changes are great. Workflows might be ok, but I've seen very few sites using them internally.
There is no collaborating on a document at the same time. There's a checkin/checkout model. While Excel offers true simultaneous editing of a file on a shared drive, that's gone if it goes in a sharepoint. Documents with OLE linking don't work. It has some limited BI capabilities, which is nice, but it's hard to embed real BI solutions (BizObj, Tableau, etc) into sharepoint so there are either links or we're dropping exported files in a document library. It would be nice to send links to people outside our company (and you can define federated identity) but that definitely requires a lot of configuration to make happen. (It's not currently set up in our company.)
As it is, since everything in Sharepoint seems to site-based, we have hundreds of individual sites across multiple sharepoint farms. There's no global way to search all share points. When there is a search, it's really, really bad compared to what people get from Google. (And glacially slow compared to google, but I suppose if we dedicated google-scale infrastructure to sharepoint, it might be better.) As a result, people do not use search. It's almost never a successful tactic. There's no automatic clustering of content like "See Also" or "Related documents".
Most groups end up using a single document library as a shared drive and maybe add a shared calendar. Meeting sites are set up by very few groups only for standing meetings, because it's a lot of work for each meeting. If one is set up, that information is siloed away from everything else. The wiki pages work, even though they aren't as easy to use as a normal wiki.
I'm sure that all of these problems could be fixed by working hard enough. That's my point: Sharepoint is a tool that groups could use to build a decent information sharing platform, with suitable care, planning, adoption of third party apps, etc. It's not a good information sharing or knowledge management tool out of the box.
And yes, there's a reason that it's used by tens of millions: it integrates with the Office products and is sold alongside the other MS enterprise offerings, and is therefore bought by lots of IT departments where the purchasers of the software are separate from the people who end up having to use it.
There are tools for that, http://www.x-media-project.org...
As for query "all the cities with more than a million people, in frenchspeaking countries" - we are not there yet. But could it be submitted as city.country.legalLanguages ="French" city.population >= 1M - if yes, and you are fine with the fact that numerical values will only be from some "fact box" - then it could be done, I think even sort of auto-complete for users wouldn't be too hard to implement.
For individual projects and small teams--yeah, sure. We even use some for those things.
The biggest problem with wikis is that they're flat and amorphous. The *two* biggest problems with wikis are that they're flat, amorphous, and they don't scale. The *three* biggest problems problems with wikis are that they're flat, they're amorphous, they don't scale, and they possess no intrinsic semantics. The *four* biggest problems, then--*Amongst* the biggest problems with wikis are issues such as... Wait, I'll come in again.
Amongst the greatest problems with wikis are such diverse issues as being flat, being amorphous, non-scalability, lack of intrinsic semantics, and nice red uniforms--oh, damn!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Well, I had written out an incredibly long response, on my phone, and then lost it when I went to look something up. You are lucky I actually care about this topic a lot or I would have just blown the whole thing off...
Anyway...
First, a clarification question: Will your users actually be submitting whole documents (whether in the form of a wiki page, html content, a .PDF file, or a word processing document) and THEN supposedly selecting multiple snippets of that document and adding metadata about those snippets? Or, will they be submitting those same documents and then merely adding metadata about the document as a whole? {Though from your description of the kinds of queries you want to be able to do, this does not seem to be what you are doing.} OR, will they be merely entering independent "factlets" of information and you want those to be structured?
Your original question lead all of us to believe that the first option is what you want. That is the option that is almost impossible to get done reliably.
I will wait for your answer before writing more.
Oracle has a Semantic layer over their RDBMS that comes with their Spatial package. My only knowledge of it comes from talking to a product manager about it a long time ago. My son works in a shop which uses SMW for their LIMS. I'd say that it's an enterprise application with him as the main developer and a few other non-IT/CS/EE folks writing queries against it. He's like a developer + DBA and everything goes through him and he writes almost all of the forms and reports from requests by his department. I've been fairly impressed with the size of their application that's been developed by a pretty small and mostly non-technical team. He has to fix SMW problems from time to time too. SMW had some rather severe problems with maintenance and I think that the group that used to do it is in Germany. There is a place to get maintenance I think but I don't know how reliable it is. He goes in and fixes problems with SMW when there's a problem that they can't work around. That's part of the fun with Open Source.
That's because any IT generalist can get a sharepoint site working. Kinda like saying "Word sucks! I've never seen anything good that had been written on Word!"
From:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/07/why-choose-a-graph-database.html
"Instead of de-normalizing for performance, you would normalize interesting attributes into their own nodes, making it much easier to move, filter and aggregate along these lines. Content and asset management, job-finding, recommendations based on weighted relationships to relevant attribute-nodes are some use cases that fit this model very well."
An example of this is/was FreeBase:
https://www.freebase.com/
(Look at the query examples.)
The Oracle Knowledge product, which was InQuira Knowledge Management until it was acquired by Oracle ~2012. We've built an integrated knowledge management / troubleshooting tool that's deployed to 100k call center agents.
The only sane reason for recommending an Oracle product is that you are working on commission from Oracle. Anything else is just insanity or pure evil.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The problem is that organizing stuff and keeping it organized requires a tremendous continuous investment of time on the part of the users no matter how much support you get from software. There is no magic bullet. Something flat and amorphous at least stands a chance of being used at all. Wikipedia has a couple of post-hoc information structuring projects; I think it's a better approach than overdoing organization before the content is entered.