Personal knowledge base

This article is about knowledge management software. For the general concept, see Personal knowledge management.
detail of a Tree of Knowledge after Diderot & d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, by Chrétien Frédéric Guillaume Roth
Information mapping
Topics and fields
Node–link approaches
See also

A personal knowledge base (PKB) is an electronic tool used by an individual to express, capture, and later retrieve personal knowledge. 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]

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]

  1. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b 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.