DICTIONARIES AND STRUCTURED KNOWLEDGE
Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and reference publications of all persuasions have gone the way of Latin, the sentence diagram, and house calls from personal physicians. Although you won’t quite find them entombed with the bones of the tyrannosaurus, the dusty shelf and yellowed pages are testament to their disuse. It’s not that knowledge has stopped expanding or that people have become disinterested (or for the etymologist, is it uninterested?) in learning. In fact, given its broad and distributed nature, knowledge management, collaboration, and knowledge sharing is more necessary than ever. In digital business, the proliferation of technology has driven the need for the rapid acquisition of new skills and the adoption of continuous learning approaches. Indeed, knowledge is as alive as ever! Instead, a silent gradual rebellion has occurred against structured knowledge.
The dictionary and its lexicographical (alphabetically ordered) cousins are the very definitions of structured knowledge and are also obvious candidates for digitization. After all, the printed versions of these tomes are heavy, cumbersome, use a lot of paper, and are expensive. But why not do away with paper entirely? Print versions cannot be updated frequently and require a significant amount of effort on each occasion. Their digital relatives can be updated continuously and easily, are much larger in size, are more portable, and are easier to search. Moreover, connecting one topic to another can be more readily achieved through the use of hyperlinks. Consider this, the print version of the Encylopaedia Britannica, published in 2002, included 65,000 articles, 44 million words and was sold to consumers for $1,395. By comparison, Wikipedia has more than 4 million articles and 2 billion words and is free to consumers (though, as a nonprofit, Wikipedia asks for donations). In 2010, due to competition from the internet and, specifically, Wikipedia, Encylopaedia Britannica announced that, after 244 years, they would be printing their very last edition. More on this story later.
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The dictionary and its lexicographical (alphabetically ordered) cousins are the very definitions of structured knowledge and are also obvious candidates for digitization. After all, the printed versions of these tomes are heavy, cumbersome, use a lot of paper, and are expensive. But why not do away with paper entirely? Print versions cannot be updated frequently and require a significant amount of effort on each occasion. Their digital relatives can be updated continuously and easily, are much larger in size, are more portable, and are easier to search. Moreover, connecting one topic to another can be more readily achieved through the use of hyperlinks. Consider this, the print version of the Encylopaedia Britannica, published in 2002, included 65,000 articles, 44 million words and was sold to consumers for $1,395. By comparison, Wikipedia has more than 4 million articles and 2 billion words and is free to consumers (though, as a nonprofit, Wikipedia asks for donations). In 2010, due to competition from the internet and, specifically, Wikipedia, Encylopaedia Britannica announced that, after 244 years, they would be printing their very last edition. More on this story later.
More Info: comptia certification jobs
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