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Ask Slashdot: Knowledge Management Systems?

Posted by Soulskill on from the for-all-the-documentation-nobody-reads dept.

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?

9 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. enterprise grade is weasel. by nimbius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:enterprise grade is weasel. by Kohath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Theoretically. In actual reality, seeking a legal remedy is very expensive and is reserved for extreme problems.

      The real leverage is the money you're going to pay them next year. Or not pay them.

    2. Re:enterprise grade is weasel. by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If they're big enough to be worth suing, they're big enough to afford decent lawyers.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    3. Re:enterprise grade is weasel. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "Software that requires a purchase order and recurring license" can have its benefits when you are looking for someone to bear legal responsibilities when something goes wrong.

      Good luck ever successfully suing and winning against Microsoft et. al. This canard should be roasted over the legal contracts and licensing paperwork.

  2. Documents and search by Kohath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Nope by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  4. Can you stick wiith one solution? by joe_frisch · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. The answer would seem to be "no" by msobkow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  6. Some tools by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.