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Re: A Taxonomy for Knowledge Management
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 2273
Posted by srdiamond15
2004-10-17 03:22:45
Those who never used GrandView, and won’t have the opportunity, are at a definite disadvantage. Did GrandView have one pane, in the manner of NoteMap—or BrainStorm, for a still purer one-pane monotheism—or was it more like a 1 1/2 pane outliner, like Inspiration or for that matter the MS Word outliner? If I understand your point about kernels, you don’t like the way two pane outliners force a distinction between topics and body text. But then I recall your wish that NoteMap allowed body text (as well as columns). So either you changed your mind or I’m misinterpreting the ‘discrete piece of data’ criticism.
Anyway, I agree with your point, or with my misinterpretation of it. The only important effect of the topic/body text distinction is to limit the operations available for one or the other. Why would anyone want to do that? (But if you put your text directly in the outline, subordinate to ‘topics,’ you surely need more than NoteMap’s nine levels.
But then the same goes for stuff you stick in your “metadata,” doesn’t it? If you put some of your relevant knowledge in a distinct metadata format, you lose the ability to manipulate that information if you should decide it is more properly data than metadata. I would prefer to put the metadata information in the place in the outline structure that it belongs, if the outliner gave me the ability to manipulate topics based on the content found in its subordinates. Unfortunately I can’t think of anything that does that.
One approach in knowledge management tools to creating an environment to create a final unformatted document to allow the spatial manipulation of blocks of text, like Writers Blocks and MLN. Do you find that helpful at all? I actually have yet to try it.