knowledge management inside alfresco

2009 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

From content to knowledge Ronny Timmermans

KM inside ECM

January 29, 2013

1


Concept of a document -> evolving

• Document = Memory Container – Comes from the Paper Age .

– Paper culture was not about “sharing”.

• Some problems – It contains (“unstructured”) natural language

– Format often linked to Functionality

• Ppt, Excel, Doc

• format dictates our model often

– Atomic -> Check out

• ECM & – -> document is a black box

– -> Adds context & Governance


Reason for existence of ECM?

• Find to reuse, verify, learn, ..

• Different types:

– By search

– By browse

– By discovery

• What do we need?

– Common vocabulary (language)

– Common model


Model? Mental Model

• Contains your business concepts

• Qualities of a good model:

– Shared

– Explicit

– Evolving

– Rich

• Real World is complex

• RDBMS is simple

• Documents are rich, but lack structure (= conventions)

• Natural language?


Alfresco’s technical Meta-Model

• Meta-data?

Meta-Model!

• The trouble with document types

• Reuse: http://www.omg.org, … etc etc

• Sharepoint? ING?

http://www.omg.org/

http://www.omg.org/


Dimensions of Search

• I want google like search?

• Use: – Context

– Author / Who

– Time

– Place (geo)

– Business concepts like

• Project

• Customer

• Case

• We are designing a search space

• How we design can evolve in time


The navigation space

• Often despised (for being redundant with meta-data), but – Tree = Intuitif – It’s flexible

• Personal • Evolves

• By containment, a folder expresses common knowledge about the content inside

• Challenge: The tree orders different dimensions at different levels. • Per customer, per year, per phase, .. • Do we have conventions?

• Alfresco: – Adds a description (not just a container icon) – Allows subtyping – -> Folder becomes a business concept (meta-model) – XeniT Fred : Dynamic folders. All children of the “multiple views” idea.


Document types

• A document is “of a type”

• Governs the meta-data

• But?

– Is it? Grey zone of 80%

– Is the document of a “type”, or are the enclosed entities?

– Mix-in types – aspects


Categories

• Non-meta-data based classification

• Often complementary to document types

• Often linked to templates (content boilerplates)

• Maybe we want to have & type&category tree?


Aspects

• What is it?

– Aspect oriented programming

– Customer, email, project, …

– Nice innovation from

• Dynamic

• Flexible part of the model

• Allow for ‘kind of’ multi-inheritance


Tags, folksonomy

• Flexible !

• Need to organise, refine


Faceted Search

• Self-service Search

• Suggests what you want to find

• Exposes data in the repository

• Best usage: show these lists already when filling in meta-data


Today … We have Multiple Stores

• ECM

• CRM

• WIKI

• ..

• How to handle? – Make sure we don’t increase search chaos

• Classical solution: – shift a layer in front = the mental model.

• Portal solves this? Portal = application integration, not information integration approach.

– We seldom simplify


Some best practices

• Use an explicit model to input, and the same model to retrieve – ex: categories

• Self contained documents • Use the context to simplify operations

– e.g. when you search or create

• Pick low hanging fruit – favorites – History : last 10 documents – faceted search – Grouping & filtering – Link to content

• Organize collaboration around central concepts – (see “share” in JIRA tickets) – We often start from the system, the tool, not the concept


Trends

• Semantic web – Semi-structured – Look inside the content

• Visualise complex information – Size of folders in navigation structure – Colour of folders

• Big data ? (did I forget the cloud )? – NoSQL more than Big DATA is interesting, because dynamic.

• Cut content to (interesting) pieces – Reuse

• Interesting pointers – http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ – www.mike2.org – Alfresco & Stanbol (apache) : EU project

http://semantic-mediawiki.org/




http://www.mike2.org/


… making document management easier

January 29, 2013 16

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