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?

Comments

Can you stick wiith one solution?

[joe_frisch]

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.