How information becomes knowledge

In my profession as a technical communicator, there is a huge emphasis on creating information: every new product and every law, policy, rule or process has its own documentation. And, although content management systems help us reuse existing information, the total amount of information is constantly growing.

Finding the right information within a reasonable amount of time is becoming more and more challenging for users. Search instruments and navigation trees do not offer a proper solution. As users of search engines like Google and Yahoo now, even the most sophisticated search engines cannot determine what information is relevant to the user and offer long lists of possibilities. On top of this, novice users often lack the necessary information to phrase useful inquiries (Horton, 1994). Navigation trees work fine on small-scale websites but, as soon as the number of topics grows, both the width and the depth of the navigation tree grow tremendously.
New semantic technologies enable us to overcome these problems and offer our users alternative ways to find and use our information.
In my blogs I will share my experiences with the methods, tools and products that I run into and look at the methodology and tools that I use in my own work.

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