It's a well-known fact that the way we interact with our computers with a graphical user interface (GUI) was developed thirty years ago at Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center: a desktop analogy, a mouse, and windows (without a capital "W").
So aren't any new ideas floating around?
One technologist who believes fervently in alternatives is David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University and a cofounder and chief technologist at Mirror Worlds Technologies Inc. Gelernter and his team have developed a software program intended to revolutionize how personal computers save and display information.
The goal: to present all information -- word-processing documents, e-mail, pictures, music, everything -- as a stream of time-ordered files that can be reorganized instantly into substreams by topic.
Edward H. Baker recently discussed with David Gelernter. Here are selected excerpts.
Q: The software your company has developed -- radical as it is -- is usually lumped into the category of knowledge management. Why does knowledge management need to be revamped?
A: I think the field of knowledge management is struggling to express the fact that it wants to move up an entire conceptual level from where conventional software has pegged it. It doesn't want to deal with traditional operating system ideas of files or even applications or data -- or for that matter, information. All this is irrelevant. People want to connect directly at a higher level to the knowledge or the information that defines their lives, and they don't want to be boxed in by an operating system or any particular machine.
Q: In thinking about the term "knowledge management," how do you distinguish between information and knowledge?
A: Well, it's really an artificial distinction. I think information and knowledge were seized on as an alternative to data and the data processing view of things. But if there is a distinction between information and knowledge, knowledge is supposed to be something at a higher level. Knowledge implies context. You can't have an isolated little tidbit of knowledge. You've got to understand what it's part of, you've got to have some idea of the big picture.
If I'm researching some topic and I come up with 147 isolated tidbits or news stories on Nexis or in e-mails or whatever, in no particular order, I have a bag of random information. But if I take those 147 bits of information and arrange them into a big picture so I understand that first this happened and then that happened and this led to this and then this happened in consequence and in the future we're expecting that, if I arrange those 147 bits and pieces into a narrative or a story that gives me some context, some feel for the big picture, then I've graduated to knowledge.
The whole story is worth reading -- especially the section on how to apply a "narrative sequence to healthcare."
And if you want to know more about Mirror Worlds Technologies Inc., you can visit the Scopeware website and look at the case studies.
Source: Edward H. Baker, CIO Insight, October 10, 2002
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