Personal knowledge base

Last updated

A personal knowledge base (PKB) is an electronic tool used to express, capture, and later retrieve the personal knowledge of an individual. It differs from a traditional database in that it contains subjective material particular to the owner, that others may not agree with nor care about. Importantly, a PKB consists primarily of knowledge, rather than information; in other words, it is not a collection of documents or other sources an individual has encountered, but rather an expression of the distilled knowledge the owner has extracted from those sources or from elsewhere. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

The term personal knowledge base was mentioned as early as the 1980s, [4] [5] [6] [7] but the term came to prominence in the 2000s when it was described at length in publications by computer scientist Stephen Davies and colleagues, [1] [2] who compared PKBs on a number of different dimensions, the most important of which is the data model that each PKB uses to organize knowledge. [1] :18 [3]

Data models

Davies and colleagues examined three aspects of the data models of PKBs: [1] :19–36

Davies and colleagues also emphasized the principle of transclusion, "the ability to view the same knowledge element (not a copy) in multiple contexts", which they considered to be "pivotal" to an ideal PKB. [1] [2] They concluded, after reviewing many design goals, that the ideal PKB was still to come in the future. [1] [2]

Personal knowledge graph

In their publications on PKBs, Davies and colleagues discussed knowledge graphs as they were implemented in some software of the time. [1] [2] Later, other writers used the term personal knowledge graph (PKG) to refer to a PKB featuring a graph structure and graph visualization. [8] However, the term personal knowledge graph is also used by software engineers to refer to the different subject of a knowledge graph about a person, [9] in contrast to a knowledge graph created by a person in a PKB. [10]

Software architecture

Davies and colleagues also differentiated PKBs according to their software architecture: file-based, database-based, or client–server systems (including Internet-based systems accessed through desktop computers and/or handheld mobile devices). [1] :37–41

History

Non-electronic personal knowledge bases have probably existed in some form for centuries: Leonardo da Vinci's journals and notes are a famous example of the use of notebooks. Commonplace books, florilegia , annotated private libraries, and card files (in German, Zettelkästen) of index cards and edge-notched cards are examples of formats that have served this function in the pre-electronic age. [11]

Undoubtedly the most famous early formulation of an electronic PKB was Vannevar Bush's description of the "memex" in 1945. [1] [2] [12] In a 1962 technical report, human–computer interaction pioneer Douglas Engelbart (who would later become famous for his 1968 "Mother of All Demos" that demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing) described his use of edge-notched cards to partially model Bush's memex. [13]

Examples

In their 2005 paper, Davies and colleagues mentioned the following, among others, as examples of software applications that had been used to build PKBs using various data models and architectures: [1]

Open source
Closed source

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hypertext</span> Text with references (links) to other text that the reader can immediately access

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind map</span> Diagram to visually organize information

A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole. It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Memex</span> Hypothetical proto-hypertext system that was first described by Vannevar Bush in 1945

Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory". The name memex is a portmanteau of memory and expansion.

In general computing, a search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. It is an information retrieval software program that discovers, crawls, transforms, and stores information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. A search engine normally consists of four components, as follows: a search interface, a crawler, an indexer, and a database. The crawler traverses a document collection, deconstructs document text, and assigns surrogates for storage in the search engine index. Online search engines store images, link data and metadata for the document as well.

Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them."

A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information management as a field of study. As an information management tool, a PIM tool's purpose is to facilitate the recording, tracking, and management of certain types of "personal information".

Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn.An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outliner</span> Type of software to organize texts

An outliner is a specialized type of text editor used to create and edit outlines, which are text files which have a tree structure, for organization. Textual information is contained in discrete sections called "nodes", which are arranged according to their topic–subtopic (parent–child) relationships, like the members of a family tree. When loaded into an outliner, an outline may be collapsed or expanded to display as few or as many levels as desired.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM).

In computer science, interactive computing refers to software which accepts input from the user as it runs.

NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. It was designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It was the first computer system to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA, NASA, and the US Air Force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TiddlyWiki</span> Wiki software

TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki and a non-linear notebook for organising and sharing complex information. It is an open-source single page application wiki in the form of a single HTML file that includes CSS, JavaScript, embedded files such as images, and the text content. It is designed to be easy to customize and re-shape depending on application. It facilitates re-use of content by dividing it into small pieces called Tiddlers.

A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database through semantic queries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic MediaWiki</span> Software for creating, managing and sharing structured data in MediaWiki

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic searches, used for aggregation of pages, displayed in formats like maps, calendars and graphs, and exported to the outside world via formats like RDF and CSV.

A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">As We May Think</span> 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush

"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945—before and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of hypertext</span>

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.

Productivity software is application software used for producing information. Its names arose from it increasing productivity, especially of individual office workers, from typists to knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider than that. Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing, and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the United States, some 78% of "middle-skill" occupations now require the use of productivity software. In the 2010s, productivity software has become even more consumerized than it already was, as computing becomes ever more integrated into daily personal life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zettelkasten</span> Knowledge management and note-taking method

A Zettelkasten or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Obsidian (software)</span> Knowledge base and note-taking software

Obsidian is a personal knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on Markdown files. It allows users to make internal links for notes and then to visualize the connections as a graph. It is designed to help users organize and structure their thoughts and knowledge in a flexible, non-linear way. The software is free for personal use, with commercial licenses available for pay.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Davies, Stephen; Velez-Morales, Javier; King, Roger (August 2005). Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases (Technical report). Boulder, Colo.: Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. CU-CS-997-05.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Davies, Stephen (February 2011). "Still building the memex". Communications of the ACM . 54 (2): 80–88. doi:10.1145/1897816.1897840. S2CID   9551946. Archived from the original on 2021-06-24.
  3. 1 2 See also the dissertation of Max Völkel, which examined personal knowledge data models, and proposed a meta-model called "Conceptual Data Structures": Völkel, Max (January 2010). Personal knowledge models with semantic technologies (Ph.D. thesis). Karlsruhe: Faculty of Economics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, University of the State of Baden-Württemberg, and National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association. doi:10.5445/IR/1000019641. OCLC   837821583.
  4. Brooks, Tom (April 1985). "New technologies and their implications for local area networks". Computer Communications. 8 (2): 82–87. doi:10.1016/0140-3664(85)90218-X.
  5. Krüger, Gerhard (1986). "Future information technology—motor of the 'information society'". In Henn, Rudolf (ed.). Employment and the transfer of technology. Berlin; New York: Springer-Verlag. pp. 39–52. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-71292-0_4. ISBN   3540166394. OCLC   14108228.
  6. Forman, George E. (1988). "Making intuitive knowledge explicit through future technology" . In Forman, George E.; Pufall, Peter B. (eds.). Constructivism in the computer age. The Jean Piaget Symposium series. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp.  83–101. ISBN   0805801014. OCLC   16922453.
  7. Smith, Catherine F. (1991). "Reconceiving hypertext" . In Hawisher, Gail E.; Selfe, Cynthia L. (eds.). Evolving perspectives on computers and composition studies: questions for the 1990s. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. pp.  224–252. ISBN   0814111661. OCLC   23462809.
  8. Pyne, Yvette; Stewart, Stuart (March 2022). "Meta-work: how we research is as important as what we research". British Journal of General Practice . 72 (716): 130–131. doi:10.3399/bjgp22X718757. PMC   8884432 . PMID   35210247.
  9. For example: Li, Xiang; Tur, Gokhan; Hakkani-Tür, Dilek; Li, Qi (December 2014). "Personal knowledge graph population from user utterances in conversational understanding". SLT 2014: 2014 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology: proceedings: December 7–10, 2014, South Lake Tahoe, Nevada, U.S.A. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. pp. 224–229. doi:10.1109/SLT.2014.7078578. ISBN   9781479971305. OCLC   945951970. S2CID   6428777. And: Cao, Lei; Zhang, Huijun; Feng, Ling (January 2022). "Building and using personal knowledge graph to improve suicidal ideation detection on social media". IEEE Transactions on Multimedia . 24: 87–102. arXiv: 2012.09123 . doi:10.1109/TMM.2020.3046867. S2CID   229210559.
  10. Balog, Krisztian; Mirza, Paramita; Skjæveland, Martin G.; Wang, Zhilin (June 2022). "Report on the Workshop on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG 2021) at AKBC 2021" (PDF). ACM SIGIR Forum. 56 (1): 1–11 (8). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-07-11. What does 'personal' in PKG mean? It could be taken to mean (objective) facts about the user (I ate lunch at restaurant X on date Y. I like fish.), subjective beliefs of the user ([I believe that] Pineapple pizza is just wrong. The Earth is flat.), or objective facts that are of particular interest to the user (Pineapple pizza is also often called Hawaiian Pizza).
  11. For example, two articles that describe the use of edge-notched cards as a personal knowledge base in health and medicine are: Hoff, Wilbur (May 1967). "A health information retrieval system for personal use". Journal of School Health . 37 (5): 251–254. doi:10.1111/j.1746-1561.1967.tb00505.x. PMID   5182183. And: Manning, Phil R.; DeBakey, Lois (1987). "The personal information center" . Medicine, preserving the passion (1st ed.). New York: Springer-Verlag. pp.  57–71 (59). doi:10.1007/978-1-4757-1954-3_3. ISBN   0387963618. OCLC   13580831. Another mention of its use by a writer is: Piercy, Marge (1982). Parti-colored blocks for a quilt . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp.  27. doi:10.3998/mpub.7442. ISBN   0472063383. OCLC   8476006. I have a memory annex which serves my purposes. It uses edge-notched cards.
  12. Bush, Vannevar (July 1945). "As we may think". Atlantic Monthly . 176 (1): 101–108.
  13. Engelbart, Douglas C. (1962). "Some possibilities with cards and relatively simple equipment". Augmenting human intellect: a conceptual framework. Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute. OCLC   8671016. Archived from the original on 2011-05-04. Retrieved 2018-08-12.