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As a programmer, I have always been wondering why object-oriented approaches, used in software development for years, were not applied more widely- to information in general. As we know, the main obstacle for this lies at a very fundamental level: there is an ambiguity in meaning of words in documents, while software is based on precisely defined commands. End readers are humans, not machines. I think we will never be able to resolve this obstacle completely. Nevertheless, we can at least extend the boundaries of what is possible. To deal with knowledge, we can introduce a slightly adjusted object-oriented paradigm, which makes information more convenient for automatic processing.

Idea one:
The subjectivity component of knowledge should also be processed.

Subjective Universe

Brian Vickery, editor of the Journal of Documentation, Oxford, quoted Heilprin: "Knowledge is subjective information... It is above all a social product... And it is a function of time, since any member of the group can challenge its consensus".

According to post-modernists, "There is no escaping the fact that knowledge has to be interpreted... Human meaning may be compared to architecture. It is always a function of when it was created or designed and where it was created or designed" /Dan Remenyi, "Achieving maximum value from information systems. A process approach", John Wiley amp; Sons Ltd., 1997, pp. 18-19/.
Moreover, in post-modernism it is claimed that there is no single reality and thus there is no reliable universal and permanent knowledge: "The current understanding of the universe is not superior to previous versions but rather, only different. All human ideas, including this one, are dependent upon prior judgements about what exists". Correspondingly, post-modernists prefer not to package ideas, but rather leave them to individual interpretation and acceptance.
An advance in computer-aided knowledge management has been associated with processing of mostly explicit data. The problem is, the same approaches are still applied to tacit types of information, like description of underlying concepts, educational and research materials.For example, data repositories work with explicitly defined content in the form of files; courseware is built on explicitly pre-defined pages from a teacher's book; etc. From database administrators' point of view it may look as a logical and convenient way of retrieval the computerized information. However, the dynamic nature of tacit information affects the overall value of any information system.
A perception of any content is always different for different people,- every student has his own personal view on interpretation of the content. In fact, users are actually creating their own views on the information as a part of learning process or research. Moreover, our subjective perception tends to be evolved in time. People are people. In the light of new information, they can easily change their opinions, shift their priorities or simply change accents in the content. Therefore, ideally, we need a kind of dynamic concept profiling, which is responsive enough to reflect changes in tacit types of information.

Idea two:
My solution is to use an infinite shell, a continues system of content improving as users work with documents. The concept supports an idea of knowledge fragmentation: Text is represented as a set of logically independent blocks,- fragments, e.g., paragraphs. If the fragment is used to represent only one main idea, it becomes an information object with its own unique address in the information space.


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