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The Art and Science of Content Models

Posted on Friday, November 6th, 2015 at 4:27 PM.

Written by Malcolm Ryder

Blueprint

The problem of personally organizing content certainly reminds us of the challenge of organizing data.

In the data management world, the original disruptive innovation was the personal calculator-with-a-memory. But even more influential, many would argue, was the spreadsheet.

If you leave out storytelling, building spreadsheets is one of the few ways that most people have ever stepped beyond lists and outlines when they wanted to represent a logical grouping of subject matters. The “natural” appeal of spreadsheets is easy to describe: I have several things that I care about (columns) and I care about each of them in several ways (rows). It is not very difficult to navigate the collection of data.

The simplicity of that approach is why it is so easy to stretch beyond organizing “facts” (the typical spreadsheet ingredient) into organizing “ideas” (the stuff that content collections are made of). I have several ideas that I care about (columns) and I think about each of them in several ways (rows).

A typical frame of reference (or framework) tackles the task of organizing ideas about a given subject area.  Usually, the first challenge is to decide what is important to understand about the subject “this time”. We “model” the subject area — literally, we represent it — with those decisions.

If there are three main things to know this time, the framework considers them to be three “dimensions”. The most familiar example of this is with objects, where we can  pay attention to the height, width and depth — 3 dimensions. We might add a fourth dimension — time — and even a fifth dimension such as cost. You can probably imagine that fewer dimensions are easier to manage and think about than are more dimensions…

Finding Content Value

One of the biggest challenges we have now is from having so much unrestricted access to information. Whether we see information as data or as ideas, nearly everyone experiences an overload of it. The problem is not something that just happens to us; much of the time it is because we are actively looking for information, using fairly powerful tools; and in the process we’re simply getting more than we needed or knew what to do with.

When we get around to taking the resulting collection of information seriously, one issue is to separate the valuable stuff from the rest. But we are easily reminded that, like clothing, particular information has varying importance according to how and when it might be used. We might keep a wide range of things just in case”…

Often we find that if someone else goes through our collection of information they come away thinking of different dimensions than we do. The difference is usually attributable to their point of view and their need. That is, we may not always be aware of how the information can have value until someone or something shows us. Punchline: there is not only one “right” way to understand something. There can be multiple ways. The dimensions that you choose make up your model of the subject area at that time. You can also make or get other models for other occasions.

One of our colleagues from the “data science” world, Joseph Pusztai at the company Cubewise, talks about this same flexibility. He writes:

“…accurately representing the dimensionality of your model is where “modeling art” meets “modeling science”. Many data mining (e.g. classification and clustering) algorithms purport to identify the naturally occurring dimensionality and hierarchies in your data, but often human intuition can do a better job, as well as enable you to introduce new dimensions into your model that did not historically exist (e.g. a car company launching their first electric vehicle will have no historical sales or production data for it). Humans are also very good at understanding that there is rarely one giant monolithic model behind a set of data, rather, we are usually dealing with dozens or even hundreds of smaller independent models, holistically interacting with each other along common dimensions. “

In that statement, we can substitute a few words (switch “data” to “content”) to recognize how the statement applies to ideas (concepts) as well as to facts.

An algorithm is like a filter; the way the filter is constructed will allow some things to be kept on top or forward, while other things fall through or away. We might literally discover a range of different things that have something in common keeping them caught, as one group, by the filter. As an alternative to algorithms, human intuition, usually reflecting experience or belief,  can also provide a filter and  a “commonality” that groups things. That one thing found in common is like a dimension.

Human understanding, especially including different flavors and levels of subject expertise, easily accounts for why one framework can satisfy an audience while other frameworks are also valid for the same content. With eXie, one collection of content can be seen in various ways, for example by several of the different personas that are found among eXie users.  A historian, a teacher, and a designer may have different respective frameworks for the same collection of content.

Do It Yourself

For your own purposes: when you pick a subject area, decide what level of expertise you want to use, and choose your “dimensions” (called themes in eXie), you are then well on your way to cataloging your curated (selected) content items for an audience. (Remember that your primary audience may be yourself in some future moment!)

By using themes to point out what you care about in the subject, your framework columns get named. Then you can point out the main ways that you usually care about those themes, which become names for your framework rows (called topics).

In data modeling, there is a lot of excitement about the powerful new tools that analyze facts and discover ways to organize them in models. With content collections, subject matter experience is held in an extremely fast and powerful tool — the mind — and modeling the collection of concepts takes place with both some new discoveries and as reinforcement of what is already familiar.

Tags: Content, Framework


Riding The Elephant

Posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2015 at 12:45 PM.

Written by Malcolm Ryder

elephant-rider

We don’t think much any more about why collections of knowledge are called knowledge “bases“…

OF course, we remember that it is a derivative of “Data Base”, and it has the great sense of being something that is someplace — a specified location that you stand on in order to do something else.

In fact, having “a sense of place” is one of the most important features of a knowledge-base.

The most straightforward way to define a place is to provide a combination of coordinates and boundaries. By doing that we get to say “the place is centered here and extends from there to these limits.”

The discipline to make those defining decisions is what domain experts most often get to bring. We tend to think of their job as being to bring the content. But because more and more content is produced every day, there is a more important job: the domain itself is always needing to be cultivated. Either the domain is carefully accepting new and better content, or it is keeping content out to avoid the risk of spoiling the quality it has already attained.

Knowledge-in-Common

Something that really brings this point into sharp focus is conferences. Most conferences are prepared in one or both of two ways: as a choreographed exhibit of some parts of a knowledge-base; and as a programmed group development of some parts of a knowledge-base. It’s all about selectivity.

Everyone involved knows that a conference can present only some of what might actually be available. There is a limited amount of time available, and when you get to the conference you can be in only one place at a time as you cover what is being revealed. You need to decide what to hit and what to miss, where to be and where not to be.

In short, you need a map, one in which the boundaries are really clear, to help you realize where everything is. and to realize what isn’t included so that you don’t waste effort looking for it there.

Special Interests

Some knowledge domains are so huge that the most helpful way to think about using them is strictly in terms of your own purpose. That is, you don’t worry about being an expert in all of the content subjects. You don’t even worry about how much content there is. Instead, you worry only about being an expert at shopping for what you need.

At least once a year, the world of IT Service Management goes to conference to take advantage of what may be its largest and most prestigious knowledge-base — the Pink Elephant content collection.

Unfortunately, only some of the world can get there at the appointed time. Fortunately, the agenda is very well publicized and becomes a type of map itself, suggesting what issues the ITSM knowledge-seeker should go on to research anyway, in absentia.

Unfortunately, conference agenda often skew heavily towards a special sensitivity that is the main draw for “this conference this time”. Fortunately, that is usually a predisposition that most ITSM people probably need to take seriously.

Unfortunately, it may not be the most important predisposition for the person at the time. The timing and specialty of an interest may also mean that certain other knowledge is simply left out. However, this provides a reason for maintaining a more generalized set of coordinates of the domain, ones which will still allow specialization to be pursued as appropriate.

That task is generally accomplished with a Framework. A framework is a collection of related issues and important things about those issues. The related issues are like the points on an x-axis. The perspectives on those issues are like the points on a y-axis. Each combination of an issue and a perspective has a spot in the overall framework.

Riding the Big One

Archestra Research took the Pink Elephant Pink15 Conference agenda and analyzed it to develop a more generic framework.

For issues, we decided to look at the major ways that ITSM has influence on Business Performance:

– creating the business capability (Leadership, Strategy and Projects)

– achieving and sustaining effectiveness (best practices, operations)

– maximizing resources (processes, tools)

For perspectives, we decided to identify the major modes of IT management’s enabling activities:

– Change (transform, plan)

– Employ (implement, run)

– Improve (optimize)

The resulting framework provided all of the coordinates needed to harness the content being advertised in the Pink15 Conference Agenda. From this point, the task was to begin collecting and “placing” the appropriate conference materials at the positions logically indicated by the framework (as seen here in progress).

pink-elephant

The framework also offers the additional and powerful guidance of pointing out areas where content should be commissioned or discovered if it is not already being provided.

Further, the framework is equally applicable to proprietary content (a private collection) and public content (such as the endless supply of items freely available on the web).

Lastly, by offering the conceptual organization as a frame of reference, there is no barrier to growing an ongoing guided collection indefinitely within the stable, persistent framework. Timing will not determine the utility of the content, and special interest is simply an accommodated subset of a visible general interest.

Guided Knowledge

This “always on” arrangement helps to understand the enormity of the Pink Elephant content collection as something that can be selectively exploited in self-guided mode, to get from an open personal concern onto a tailored knowledge path.

Likewise, any large collection of content can be cataloged in a logical frame of reference that clarifies the utility value of the included content.

And finally, domain expertise serves strongly to propose and refine the dimensions of the frame of reference — the choice of issues and perspectives that propose a practical scope of the available knowledge. The framework itself can have variations and can evolve, as well as having partner frameworks that map out other conceptually complementary domains or domains that share parts in common with the first framework.

Information about Pink Elephant and the Pink15 Conference is readily available here.

Tags: Framework, Pink Elephant, Pink15, Special Interests


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