Organising Documentation in Knowledge Evolution and Communication

Cristina De Castro, Paolo Toppan

The knowledge of a subject evolves in time due to many factors, such as better understanding, study of additional issues within the same subject, study of related work from other themes, etc. This can be achieved by individual work, direct cooperation with other people and, in general, knowledge sharing. In this context, and in the broader context of knowledge communication, the appropriate organisation of documentation plays a fundamental role, but is often very difficult to achieve. A layered architecture is here proposed for the development of a structured repository of documentation, here called knowledge-bibliography KB. The process of knowledge acquisition, evolution and communication is firstly considered, then the distributed nature of nowadays knowledge and the ways it is shared and transferred are taken into account. On the basis of the above considerations, a possible clustering of documentation collected by many people is defined. An LDAP-based architecture for the implementation of this structure is also discussed.

Full Text