Personal knowledge base

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.[1][2][3]

This article is about knowledge management software. For the general concept, see Personal knowledge management.
Information mapping
Topics and fields
Node–link approaches
See also

The term personal knowledge base was mentioned as early as the 1980s,[4][5][6][7] but the term came to prominence 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]

Davies and colleagues examined three aspects of the data models of PKBs:

  • their structural framework, which prescribes rules about how knowledge elements can be structured and interrelated (as a tree, graph, tree plus graph, spatially, categorically, or as n-ary links);
  • their knowledge elements, or basic building blocks of information that a user creates and works with, and the level of granularity of those knowledge elements (such as word/concept, phrase/proposition, free text notes, links to information sources, or composite); and
  • their schema, which involves the level of formal semantics introduced into the data model (such as a type system and related schemas, keywords, attribute–value pairs, etc.).[1]:19–36

Davies and colleagues also differentiated PKBs according to their 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

Non-electronic personal knowledge bases have probably existed in some form for centuries: Da Vinci's notebooks are a famous example. More commonly, files of index cards (in German, Zettelkasten), edge-notched cards and annotated private libraries, have served this function in the pre-electronic age.[8] Undoubtedly the most famous early formulation of an electronic PKB was Vannevar Bush's description of the "memex" in 1945.[1][2][9] 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.[10]

Examples

Davies and colleagues mentioned the following as examples of software applications that have been used to build PKBs:[1]

Open source
Closed source

See also

References
  1. 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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  2. Davies, Stephen (February 2011). "Still building the memex". Communications of the ACM. 54 (2): 80–88. doi:10.1145/1897816.1897840.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  3. 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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  8. 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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link) 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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  9. Bush, Vannevar (July 1945). "As we may think". Atlantic Monthly. 176 (1): 101–108.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  10. 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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
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