The Knowledge Web

In The Knowledge Web, James Burke, the bestselling author and host of television's Connections series, takes us on a fascinating tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill. Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across a web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody -- high school graduates and Ph.D. holders alike. The journey touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins. At once amusing and instructing, The Knowledge Web heightens our awareness of our interdependence -- with one another and with the past. Only by understanding the interrelated nature of the modern world can we hope to identify complex patterns of change and direct the process of innovation to the common good.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Featuring contributions from staff and associates of the Knowledge Media Institute at the UK Open University, this text provides a glimpse into the wide variety of projects undertaken in the development and assessment of distance learning technologies.

Stanley Madan Kumar, b. 1941, library scientist from Karnataka; contributed articles.

Provides a single record of technologies and practices of the Semantic approach to the management, organization, interpretation, retrieval, and use of Web-based data.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Knowledge management is a hot topic in the modern corporate world and this unique, practical book helps managers utilize corporate information to achieve real gains in productivity and profitability.

Whilst enterprise technology departments have been steadily building their information and knowledge management portfolios, the Internet has generated new sets of tools and capabilities which provide opportunities and challenges for improving and enriching knowledge work. This book fills the gap between strategy and technology by focussing upon the functional capabilities of Web 2.0 in corporate environments and matching these to specific types of information requirement and behaviour. It takes a resource based view of the firm: why and how can the knowledge capabilities and information assets of organisations be better leveraged using Web 2.0 tools? Identifying the underlying benefits requires the use of frameworks beyond profitability and cost control. Some of these perspectives are not in the usual business vocabulary, but when applied, demonstrate the role that can be played by Web 2.0, how to manage towards these and how to assess success. Transactive memory systems, social uncertainty, identity theory, network dynamics, complexity theory, organisational memory and the demographics of inter- generational change are not part of normal business parlance but can be used to clarify Web 2.0 application and potentiality. Written by a well-respected practitioner and academic Draws on the author’s practical experience as a technology developer, designer, senior manager and researcher Provides approaches to understanding and tackling real-world problems