Using a collection of content as a knowledgebase makes sense, unless doing that is more trouble than it's worth.But the solution to the trouble is simple.

1. From Content to
Knowledge
An eXie Case Study

2. Introduction: Knowledge Search
Using the web today means having easy access to a virtually unlimited volume of content about any
idea, regardless of its generality or specificity.
That creates an opportunity to endlessly gather, mix and match content (and therefore ideas) into
new ad hoc collections for one reason or another. Today, these collections are then kept online as
often as offline.
Online access is of course highly convenient to researchers. A researcher looks for content that
provides clarification and explanation of certain ideas.
The flip side of that ease is that many discoverable collections of content are expanding, shrinking,
or morphing with revisions over time; consequently, their current or future usability, whether
predicted or actual, is less reliable. Every year, surveys show that researchers continue to encounter
this problem – not only with other people’s collections, but with their own!
Consequently, our instinct to approach these content collections as “knowledge bases” comes with
notable uncertainty…

3. Researching Content
Researching a very broad subject area usually means handling source material about the
subject from a very wide range of providers and perspectives.
In finding and selecting the best content to use, two issues arise:
• the need to survey the subject across a large volume of items and breadth of
perspectives;
• the need to determine why any particular discovered content is important to choose and
include for future reference.
The ongoing collecting of material poses two distinct challenges:
• determining when enough research (coverage) has been done;
• and, adequately and consistently organizing the findings into a “usable” re-presentation
of ideas.

4. Choosing Content…
A researcher creates and saves notes about the ideas found in content.
All along, the notes are being individually refined, to help make their key observations
more distinct and recognizable.
“Key” observations are the ones that represent why the research is worth doing.
Most key observations are ones that either surface repeatedly across many different
sources, or that instead present a relatively unusual idea.
In both cases, the observation is made in comparison to the large volume of available
content.
The compiled notes become the reference points for both keeping content already found
and searching for additional content.

5. More content is good, but…
Large, diverse volumes of existing source material can boost the supply of desired
evidence.
The evidence can add depth to earlier recognized ideas and to distinctive new ones as well.
But again, working online now taps into an almost inexhaustible supply of material.
Increasingly, there is an overload of content to confront, making it difficult for the
researcher to assess, save and organize efficiently for use in developing or supporting
newer work.

6. More can be less…
However, compiling and refining notes from researched content creates yet another
collection of ideas.
Ongoing research continually adds to the volume and variety of notes, and it also affects
earlier decisions and notes, sometimes changing them. In effect, continued work on notes
may reproduce the “problem” of the source content collections.
This means that the references themselves are subject to the same problems of
organization and usability that came with the original supply of content.
That is, the collection of notes can expand, contract, or be revised almost continually –
sometimes suddenly, and with unpredictable frequency.
Net: without a plan that guides ongoing collection and review of source materials, greater
volume can easily add labor without increasing the quality and completeness of the
research.

7. Solution: frameworks
A curator takes on all of the above challenges, producing a more tailored collection of
content for targeted use. The goal is to make a very broad subject area more manageable,
and to make that improvement explicit.
The curator wants to make a content collection about a known subject matter valuable
through the selectivity of its ideas and emphasis.
By having a plan for organizing the selection of content, the user avoids including content
of ambiguous value, and can visibly affirm that the useful scope and focus of ideas is being
reached in collecting.
A framework is a special plan that makes inclusion and relevance easy to define, display
and track – remaining visibly consistent and evident throughout research and re-use of
content.

8. Framing references
Using a framework, a researcher or content producer logically decides how and why any
number of ideas, from any range of sources, should be included and associated.
As a result, source content collections, whether already established or in progress, are
systematically tamed and clarified for effective use in the intended current purpose.
Researchers use notes about the researched content to tame and clarify the collection.
Overall, the problem with the collection of notes is in knowing when its ideas were
complete enough, or perhaps even excessive, for the necessary scope of the subject
matter.
This is where having a framework comes in, to supply logical selection criteria in a
systematic way.
The framework then becomes both the guide for ongoing collecting and the guide for
retrieving what has already been saved.

9. Management challenges
Collections of content, whether pre-fabricated or being virtually created on demand
through real-time discovery, are used to provide source material that supports ongoing
new work. But this support is based on specialization
The “source” collection itself exists with the intent to make all of its contained ideas readily
available to any user (who then has the option to select or dismiss the material).
However, a particular researcher’s main strategy for “content usefulness” is different -- to
distill collections of content into prioritized notes about certain key ideas being offered in
the collection.
Surveys repeatedly show that the major flaw in content collections is usually the difficulty
users have – in labor and in recognition – with determining whether the collection contains
the right kind of ideas for the user’s current purpose at hand.

10. Content versus knowledge
More than one researcher may go to the same source collection. In fact, the collection is
more valuable when it can support multiple researchers.
But this does not mean that both researchers are interested in discovering, verifying, or
emphasizing the same ideas. Supporting the users must succeed on an individual basis.
For the individual content researcher, initially creating great notes for future reference is
the outcome of overcoming the difficulty of relevant discovery.
Those created notes would then ideally stay linked, somehow, to the source material that
suggested or presented them.
It becomes evident, then, that the same given content collection might get “linked” to
different sets of notes, due to different interests being pursued by one user versus another.
In that case it is not certain that two users will “gain” the same ideas from the same
content collection, unless they also share their selection criteria.

11. Reference content
Any given item of content may contain several ideas; and any idea may occur in more than
one item of content. This makes content collections rich but not necessarily very
predictable or even usable.
A distinguishing feature of a knowledgebase is that it offers the reasons why its content is
useful. That is, it systematically communicates the relevance, not just the availability, of its
content.
Even so, different users may approach content collections from differing types of interest
or purposes, predisposing their sense of how something is relevant.
A curator works on prescribing relevance, so that a user (researcher) finds important
content faster and more easily, while obtaining meanings in common with other users.

12. Content as Knowledge
Curating a knowledgebase from a researcher’s available content

13. Organizing Knowledge
In collections of research notes, many of the ideas are closely related to each other,
forming potential “groups” of ideas.
Groupings most often lead to thinking about categories and sub-categories. However,
unless categories are proposed and used in the beginning of the research, the findings may
not easily suggest them later, even when ideas seem to fall into groups.
Research always has a motivation, and the motivation will affect how importance is
attributed to ideas found in content. To begin creating a knowledgebase, we ask why the
research is taking place at all.
In the following example, we see ideas compiled from research about “Learning”.
We found that the general motive behind the research was to address how modern access
to content is affecting learning.
That helped to define the researcher’s high-level subject as “modern learning strategies”.

14. A wide range of research notes and new ideas was distilled from several collections of source content
Source Content, in
various collections,
included both
frequently
recurring ideas and
relatively unusual
ideas, seen in these
notes.
Content items in
the collection
supported both the
most common and
the most
uncommon ideas.
Intellect, ideas and knowledge are different but systemically related.
The value of knowledge is in adaptation across environments.
Multi-environment adaptability is the education agenda.
The value of teaching is to predispose effective performance.
Self-service is a naturally emerging adaptive behavior.
Knowledge develops through a managed information transfer.
Meaning is derived through contexts and affinities.
In learning, interpretation creates meaning from intelligence.
Validation of content is a prerequisite of its value as knowledge.
The content promoter’s purpose must be compatible with the user’s intention.
Learning is a capability, and Education is developmental.
Alternative paths of knowledge gain are the next normal.
Self-service learning leverages frameworks and models for value.
Critical thinking is the default paradigm of learning.
Freedom of thought is natural and should become normal in practice.
Learning requires both facilitation and authority.
Learning enables on-demand production of appropriate knowledge.

15. Framing the references
Next we applied a frame-of-reference to the subject area. The basic technique relies on
identifying generic themes in a subject area (what is important about the subject), and
identifying generic topics about those themes (why or how the theme is important).
The frame then cross-references the themes versus the topics.
For this effort’s subject matter (“Learning”), we assessed each individual research note for
what kind of statement it made, about:
• major distinctive objectives in modern strategies, and / or
• how to define the practice of pursuing those objectives.

16. Knowledge Frameworks
Upon inspecting and comparing the individual notes, the strategy objectives found were
then used as themes, and the supporting practices were used as topics. The researcher’s
notes from the source content offered the following recurring generic themes and topics
about learning strategies:
In the case above, the researcher had also given each of the key notes a “title” effectively
representing (“indexing”) its discovered or proposed relevance to “learning”.

18. VALUE PROCESS INTENT SELF-SERVICE DEFINITIONS
Overview
History of
Knowing
The Information
Landscape
Producing
Knowledge
Becoming
“Learned”
Mind Mapping
Requirements
Getting Educated A Learning
Dynamic
Processing
Content
Intellectual
Autonomy
Acquiring
Concepts
Methods
The Ambiguity of
Content
Programming
Learning
The Diversity of
Approach
Designing
Knowledge
Meta-Knowledge
Performance
Proof of
Learning
Managed
Learning
©2014 Malcolm Ryder / archestra research
Next, all notes for “Modern Learning Strategy” were placed in the frame of reference.
The framework guides the compilation, refinement and grouping of items of content. The research content had
been summarized as titled notes (e.g., “History of Knowing”). In the framework, clearly evident to any user,
those titles show where and why certain groups of ideas (content) have relevance, thus value, in covering the
overall subject matter. At this point, the framework also provides a “research agenda” for any future acquisition
of old or new content, to add to any relevant place within the framework. A few areas still remain open for
attention, to further extend the scope of coverage.

19. Result: a consistent, persistent knowledgebase
A frame of reference exposes the reasons why available content is relevant to the coverage
and understanding of a subject. That is what converts the content collection into a
knowledge base.
Several important advantages immediately apply:
• The framework allows the content user to choose different points of focus at will, without losing the “big
picture” context of any point. Each focal point identifies an idea that ongoing content research can expand
or critique with new content items.
• By declaring how to consistently identify relevance, the framework both describes and suggests what kind
of content should exist to cover the subject area.
• The framework also displays “lines” of thought (e.g., columns, or rows) that link the content items together
in an orderly sequence of presentation without gaps. Such sequencing provides narrative, programmed or
other logical exposure to the ideas in the content, which supports development, coursework, training, or
other progressive references.
With this approach to organizing ideas for reference, the next step is to support doing it
with a related application that takes advantage of the content already being on the web.

20. Using eXie
Archestra Research used the eXie content
curating platform for this knowledge base
project.
eXie is a Saas offering allowing its user to
create, populate and share catalogs of
curated online content in a framework that
is designed, resident, and accessed on the
web. Users can both find and retrieve the
content through the catalogs. Each cell in
the frame opens to store and show content.
Catalog and frame management is built into
the interface.

21. With eXie, a content user predefines, shows and sees the
reason why selected content is included in a collection for
ongoing reference.
An eXie framework visually displays and cross-references
terms of relevance for locating items of content,
systematically guiding coverage of a designated subject
area. A frame contains titled cells; each cell can be
annotated as well. A cell contains links to live content.
As a curator, a user defines the frame’s subject matter and
range of concept coverage, for content collection and later
retrieval or presentation. As a content manager, the user
sizes, labels and populates a frame as a visually explicit
guide-by-relevance to content. Users make as many frames
as desired, and import content links as desired.
The eXie content framing technique applies to any subject
of any size or complexity, allowing a librarian approach to
serving the knowledge needs of any role or persona of user.
About eXie
www.exieframes.com info@exieframes.com

22. ©2015 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
www.archestra.com
mryder@archestra.com