∞ is a collaborative hypertext knowledge management system built on the web.
In this rapidly changing world, advantage belongs to those who can adapt most quickly to the times. Nobody knows where the web is taking us; nobody knows where this new economy is headed; both are different enough that they seem to warrant new ways of thinking and new approaches. The stunning rise of the networked world in business and the popular conciousness has brought with it an impressive array of new technologies in such a short time. By virtue of its being a decentralized single information space, the web connects anyone to anyone else - business to business, business to consumer, government to citizen, religious leader to follower, rebel group to sympathizer, teacher to class, family to family, autonomous agent to anything... the web is changing nearly everything from financial services to retail product distribution to journalism to advertising to taxation to politics. To paraphrase Vannevar Bush, the world has arrived at an age of instantaneous connectivity among everything; something is bound to come of it. But as always, the better informed decisions are the better decisions. What many don't yet see is that the way a decision can become informed is entirely different in this new world.
There is so much going on, and it is all changing quickly enough that it is not possible to study and learn everything about the market in the pre-web sense. The number of information sources is significantly greater than ever before, and everyone is potentially connected to everyone else. Online magazines "publish" and update articles at any time; anyone can see twenty-minute delayed stock quotes; entire markets exist soley online; individuals with special knowledge of a subject publish their opinions and information online; and so on. What organization has the time, resources, or energy to keep track of this?
Organizational "knowledge management" might be a contradiction, because the memory and knowledge of an organization is the combined experiences of the individuals. A knowledge management strategy that is largely the storage of all documents produced by the organization is probably significantly lesser than the sum of the experience of the individuals. Document management is important, but what did we learn? What were the lessons? Can we abstract our experiences in any meaningful way to allow us to see global patterns that emerge? Can we see broad, abstract relations in our web of knowledge? Or can we just keyword search a database?
If the purpose of an organization is really to magnify a collection of individuals, at the very least, we must be able to manage knowledge as an individual does -- knowledge by association. Organizing knowledge by arbitrary classification schemes is The Problem, the primary impediment to finding what you need, according to Vannevar Bush in his famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Ted Nelson coined "hypertext" in the 1960's, and we were given the world wide web by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1990's to address this issue as well: making a web of meaningful associations among things which are related, and allowing anyone to contribute. But in 1999, much of the hypertext on the web is still being used to build hierarchical classification systems, hyperlinks have no meaning, and it is hard to contribute (online editing). And web search engines index hypertext documents by keyword!
The so-called semantic web hasn't happened yet. it's hard, of course, to represent concepts and elements which can be linked together arbitrarily to form a semantic web of associations as does our brain. Contributors to the web of knowledge today write documents, just as we do on paper, though some of the words are hyperlinks. There is no mechanism to handle the conceptual organization of knowledge.
The reason the world wide web works at all as a source of knowledge is that there is no authority on what knowledge is and isn't valid; anyone can contribute. This is an essential property of any knowledge system. Books are the same way since there are many individual authors, though the bar is higher to get a book published - and thus, all books taken as a whole will ultimately reflect the state of the world less accurately than will the world wide web.
If an organization is to have in some sense a base of knowledge that reflects the reality of that organzation, contribution must be decentralized and self-organizing as much as possible. Its organization must be based on meaningful associations among all the bits of knowledge everyone has.
What's missing from the web today, and which XML / RDF initiatives of the W3C are trying to put back into it is collaboration and semantic meaning. ∞ is a system which offers capabilities in both of these areas to a limited extent.
There are three primary concepts in ∞: Views, Associations, and Things. Anyone, through the web browser, can create new Things, associate several Things within an existing View, and define new Views.
Things are the primary information vehicles. People, projects, roles, administrative procedures, bug reports, software modules, etc. are all likely Things. They are stored as XML documents and:
Each Thing has its own URI, which means that individual Things can be linked to in the "traditional" web way from any other hypertext document. ∞ provides an additional linking mechanism that implements two of Tim Berners-Lee's original intentions: two-way linking capabilities and semantic meaning.
A View is one way to organize Things.