KO and the Enterprise of the Future

KM World recently ran a short but spot-on article entitled The Future of the The Future: An opportunity for real change by Art Murray. A couple of short excerpts should suffice to convey the flavour:

“In today’s economic climate, it’s clear more than ever—traditional business models no longer work. They are too slow and impede the flow of knowledge—the exact opposite of what is needed to succeed in a turbulent, high-risk economy.”

“At the very least, we need to momentarily halt the process, introduce some serious changes and reboot. Here’s a partial list of specific transformations, any one of which will introduce a new way of doing business that will help propel you forward.”

Murray’s five transformations (on which he elaborates) are:

• Make the move from hierarchies to networks once and for all
• Make the cultural shift from silos and knowledge hoarding to openness and knowledge sharing
• Move from slow, random learning to a systemized approach for fast learning
• Become fixated on systemic improvements rather than point solutions
• Move from saying, “That’ll never work here,” to “Let’s find a way to make it work.”

A better checklist of survival initiatives I cannot imagine. Similar sentiments are being expressed elsewhere, from Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated a few years ago, to the challenge posed by Web 2.0 to structured information management disciplines like Records Management  (see e.g. Steve Dale’s recent blog entry EDRM and Web 2.0 – where two worlds collide).

The question is, where does this relentless drift towards the informal, the unstructured and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ leave the highly structured world of KO?

New KOOLTool: NSDL Metadata Registry

Interested parties are invited to evaluate a recent addition to our portfolio of KOOLTools. The NSDL (National Science Digital Library) Metadata Registry is an online (and optionally local) application for creating and sharing metadata schemas and associated structured vocabularies. The application aims to provide services to developers and consumers of controlled vocabularies and claims to be one of the first production deployments of the RDF-based Semantic Web Community’s Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS).

Interoperability and reduction of duplicate effort are the key objectives. The NSDL Metadata Registry describes its mission thus:

“Building on work in the Dublin Core community on metadata registries, we propose to develop and deploy an NSDL metadata registry (hereafter, “the Registry”) to enable collection holders creating metadata for their collections and various applications that generate, consume and process metadata to identify, declare and publish their metadata schemas (element/property sets) and schemes (value spaces/controlled vocabularies) in support of discovery, reuse, standardization and interoperability within NSDL and globally. We proposed to accomplish this task by building on existing work within the communities focused on metadata management issues including the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and researchers in networked knowledge organization systems.”

Further information is available on the NSDL Metadata Registry site.

If you would like to evaluate this KOOLTool on behalf of ISKO UK KOnnect, please advise your interest by posting a comment.