1. KM inside ECM
From content to knowledge
Ronny Timmermans
January 29, 2013
1
2009 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

2. Concept of a document -> evolving
• Document = Memory Container
– Comes from the Paper Age .
– Paper culture was not about “sharing”.
• Some problems
– It contains (“unstructured”) natural language
– Format often linked to Functionality
• Ppt, Excel, Doc
• format dictates our model often
– Atomic -> Check out
• ECM &
– -> document is a black box
– -> Adds context & Governance
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

3. Reason for existence of ECM?
• Find to reuse, verify, learn, ..
• Different types:
– By search
– By browse
– By discovery
• What do we need?
– Common vocabulary (language)
– Common model
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

4. Model? Mental Model
• Contains your business concepts
• Qualities of a good model:
– Shared
– Explicit
– Evolving
– Rich
• Real World is complex
• RDBMS is simple
• Documents are rich, but lack structure (= conventions)
• Natural language?
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

5. Alfresco’s technical Meta-Model
• Meta-data?
Meta-Model!
• The trouble with
document types
• Reuse:
http://www.omg.or
g, … etc etc
• Sharepoint? ING?
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

6. Dimensions of Search
• I want google like search?
• Use:
– Context
– Author / Who
– Time
– Place (geo)
– Business concepts like
• Project
• Customer
• Case
• We are designing a search space
• How we design can evolve in time
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

7. The navigation space
• Often despised (for being redundant with meta-data), but
– Tree = Intuitif
– It’s flexible
• Personal
• Evolves
• By containment, a folder expresses common knowledge about the content
inside
• Challenge: The tree orders different dimensions at different levels.
• Per customer, per year, per phase, ..
• Do we have conventions?
• Alfresco:
– Adds a description (not just a container icon)
– Allows subtyping
– -> Folder becomes a business concept (meta-model)
– XeniT Fred : Dynamic folders. All children of the “multiple views” idea.
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

8. Document types
• A document is “of a type”
• Governs the meta-data
• But?
– Is it? Grey zone of 80%
– Is the document of a “type”, or are the enclosed entities?
– Mix-in types – aspects
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

9. Categories
• Non-meta-data based classification 
• Often complementary to document types
• Often linked to templates (content boilerplates)
• Maybe we want to have & type&category tree?
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

10. Aspects
• What is it?
– Aspect oriented programming
– Customer, email, project, …
– Nice innovation from
• Dynamic
• Flexible part of the model
• Allow for ‘kind of’ multi-inheritance
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

11. Tags, folksonomy
• Flexible !
• Need to organise, refine
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

12. Faceted Search
• Self-service Search
• Suggests what you want to find
• Exposes data in the repository
• Best usage: show these lists already when filling in
meta-data
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

13. Today … We have Multiple Stores
• ECM
• CRM
• WIKI
• ..
• How to handle?
– Make sure we don’t increase search chaos
• Classical solution:
– shift a layer in front = the mental model.
• Portal solves this? Portal = application integration, not
information integration approach.
– We seldom simplify
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

14. Some best practices
• Use an explicit model to input, and the same model to retrieve
– ex: categories
• Self contained documents
• Use the context to simplify operations
– e.g. when you search or create
• Pick low hanging fruit
– favorites
– History : last 10 documents
– faceted search
– Grouping & filtering
– Link to content
• Organize collaboration around central concepts
– (see “share” in JIRA tickets)
– We often start from the system, the tool, not the concept
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

15. Trends
• Semantic web
– Semi-structured
– Look inside the content
• Visualise complex information
– Size of folders in navigation structure
– Colour of folders
• Big data ? (did I forget the cloud )?
– NoSQL more than Big DATA is interesting, because dynamic.
• Cut content to (interesting) pieces
– Reuse
• Interesting pointers
– http://semantic-mediawiki.org/
– www.mike2.org
– Alfresco & Stanbol (apache) : EU project
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions

16. XeniT
… making document
management easier
January 29, 2013 16
2010 - Proprietary and Confidential Information of XeniT Solutions