Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

What's "open source knowledge management"?

December 5th, 2007
<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/12/05/whats-open-source-knowledge-management/
>
by dwentworth

One of the biggest challenges we face at Science Commons is explaining
what we do — and, much more important, why it matters.

In many cases, the core problem is translation; what makes sense to a
computer scientist is gibberish to a life scientist, and vice versa. We
want to connect with as many people as possible, both within the
scientific community and beyond. To that end, we've decided to publish a
series of posts to bring more clarity to the terms and phrases we use.
To make sure these posts are truly useful, we'll be asking for your
feedback. Got questions? Criticism? A better definition of a term than
the one we're proposing? We hope you'll send us an email
<mailto:dwentworth AT creativecommons.org> or add your comments to the post.

First up is a term we've been using to describe our Neurocommons project
<
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/>: "open source knowledge
management." This is a hybrid term that splices together concepts from
the worlds of business and software development.

The first part, "open source," is derived from "open source software."
Open source software is software that's published with licensing to
allow anyone to look under the hood at the underlying "source" code to
see how it works. Any developer can copy the code and modify it — either
to improve the original software, or build on it to create something
brand new.

"Knowledge management," or KM, is a term often used by businesses to
describe the systems they have for organizing, accessing, and using
information — everything from the data in personnel files to the number
of products on store shelves. One reason that it's "knowledge"
management rather than "information" management is that the word
knowledge connotes /use/ of information, not just its availability.
Having the ability to use information is what makes it valuable. One
classic example is Wal-Mart, which used real-time data about its
inventory to realize tremendous, game-changing efficiency gains and
cost-savings.

So how is our Neurocommons project an "open source knowledge management"
project? In a nutshell, Science Commons is developing all of the key
elements for a free, web-enabled KM system for biological research that
anyone can use, and anyone can build on. Right now, scientists don't
know "what's on the shelf" — either in terms of research data or
materials. They don't have an easy way to sort through or make sense of
the terabytes of data being produced in laboratories around the world.
They certainly don't have "one-click" access to materials like cell
lines. We want to change that. Our goal isn't (simply) to increase
efficiency in the research cycle and magnify the impact of investments
in research. Ultimately, we hope to speed the pace of discovery —
unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work
scientists are doing.

If you'd like to learn more about the Neurocommons project, check out
our project page <
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/>. If you have
questions, send us an email <mailto:dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>.
We'd love to hear from you.

................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth AT creativecommons.org
................