In the presentation rooms, you feel safe. You’re sitting in a chair. Not too close to the front, but close enough to the door, should you need to make a quick escape. You can listen as intently as you like, wander up to the mike and ask a question, or twitter away to your heart’s content.

Not so in the exhibit hall. There, you’re wide open. No place to hide. When you first walk in, there’s the HUGE Autonomy booth. You feel its gravity tugging at you, like one of the large gas planets in our solar system. But after a while, you adjust to the new environment. You suddenly realize – there’s some interesting stuff going on in here! Real stuff. Things you can put your hands on.

Although pretty soon, you begin to see a pattern. Most of the tools are centered on search. In fact, 32 of the 47 tool vendors listed on the conference website (68%) have the word “search” in their product description. That’s fine. Most of us agree that search is a key element of KM, and it’s something in which we have lots of room for improvement. But still, the huge emphasis on IT-based products, at a KM conference, leads me to ask the question…

“Where have all the knowledge engineers gone?”

After all, we are in the shadow of what used to be one of the hotbeds of AI. You know, Stanford. SRI. Those places. But nobody seems to be doing knowledge engineering anymore. Instead, you just enter what you’re looking for, and in an instant, server farms and search algorithms present you with all the documents you could ever want, and more. Need to narrow your search a bit? No problem. Just a few iterations, and those millions of hits are narrowed down to a few hundred, then to a few dozen.

But now what? If you’re an old AI’er like me, you want to put pieces of that retrieved data and information into a real knowledge tool – just like the inside of your head. You want to put it next to something. Link it to things. A place where you can not only access it quickly, without going back out into the “cloud,” but where you can instantly see how it relates to everything else.

If only such a tool existed. But just when you were about to give up, and submit to being assimilated into the cloud collective, you see it. Right there, on a big, flat-panel screen. Thoughts! All brightly displayed, and woven together. Just like the inside of your brain. Is it really true? Yes it is. You’ve stumbled across…

TheBrain

When you visit TheBrain’s booth (#129), you will more than likely be looking at one of Shelley Hayduck’s many “brains.” Hopefully it will make you want to build one that’s all your very own.

Yes, use one or more of those amazing search tools. Throw in some semantic indexing. XML tagging. Any number of enhancements available there on the exhibit floor. But be sure to pick up a PersonalBrain CD, or ask about the enterprise version, TheBrain EKP. And start linking and mapping those documents, those “fragments” you’ve been retrieving, and put them into your own personal or organizational knowledge space. Then watch it grow. You’ll be amazed at what you know. And your memory will dramatically improve too!