Denham Grey has been thinking about knowledge management for a long time - it looks like he has been turning his thoughts to some of the issues I touched on in Semantic Aggregation and Filtering. He writes in Social Categorisation:

The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.

Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future…

He adds a fourth mechanism for extracting and sharing a taxonomy

The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.

Imagine if you wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later search and browsing - Now that would really assist content sharing!

to which I would add another nuance - as well as deploying these tools to categorise your own text how about deploying them inside a feed aggregator with mapping rules based on the reader’s frame of reference - this way in addition to using the author’s taxonomy you could decide how to categorise a piece of content in the reader’s context.

Update: From this article via Denham’s wiki it looks like there has been a lot of work in this area already…

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