Conceptual data structures for personal knowledge management

Structured Abstract Purpose – Designing a model and tools that are (a) capable of representing and handling personal knowledge in different degrees of structuredness and formalisation and (b) usable and extensible by end-users. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the result of analysing literature and various data-models and formalism used to structure information on the desktop. Findings – The unified data model (CDS) is capable of representing structures from various information tools, e. g. documents, file system, hypertext, tagging, and mind maps. The five knowledge axes of CDS are: identity, order, hierarchy, annotation and linking. Research limitations / implications – The CDS model is based on text. Extensions for multimedia annotations have not been investigated. Practical implications – Future PKM tools should take the mentioned shortcoming of existing PKM tools into account. Implementing the CDS model can be a way to make PKM tools interoperable. Originality/value – This paper presents research combining cognitive psychology, personal knowledge management and semantic web technologies. The CDS model shows a way to let end-users work on different levels of granularity and different levels of formality in one environment. Introduction " The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was to increase manual worker productivity fifty-fold. The most important contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase knowledge worker productivity – hopefully by the same percentage. [...] The methods, however, are totally different from those that increased the productivity of manual workers. " Drucker (1999a, p. 79) What might these methods be? The field of knowledge management investigates since 1995 (Stankosky, 2005) how people and knowledge work together. North (2007) defines knowledge work as work based on knowledge with an immaterial result; value creation is based on processing, generating and communicating knowledge. Polanyi (1966) makes a distinction between explicit knowledge encoded in artefacts such as books or web pages, and tacit knowledge which resides in the individual. The SECI-model of Nonaka (1994) describes knowledge transfers between humans and artefacts. The field of knowledge management has focused on knowledge transfer between people, either via socialisation or via externalised artefacts. The high expectations of central enterprise knowledge repositories have often not been met (Braganza and Mollenkramer, 2002). The following wave of expert finders and corporate white pages focused mostly on connecting the right people and let them communicate. Today, knowledge workers are flooded with information (Alvarado et al., 2003). The field of Personal …