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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.