KIX - the federated collaboration
and knowledge integration tool.
collaboration framework provides a web arena for integrated
application and development of 'knowledge'. KIX stands for eXtensible Integrated Knowledge
The knowledge can be of any
grade from tacit knowledge to explicitly expressed
formal knowledge. KIX supports knowledge in natural language documents - such knowledge belongs to a grade somewhere in between.
- KIX supports the use of tacit knowledge e.g. in collaborative decision making.
- KIX supports automated or semi-automated application of formalised knowledge by automatic knowledge processing in configured framework plug-ins.
KIX was designed to scale from the very small part-time business to the multinational global business. The federated design and implementation of KIX can support collaborations of any size and complexity.
KIX also provides assistance with the successive
evolution of formalised knowledge through strong support for
- KIX supports automatic feed-forward by notifying dependent stake holders when changes to controlling documents are planned or executed.
- KIX supports feedback by providing a web discussion forum with every published document version, where the stake holders may address any collaboration issues. Such discussions may be kept as organisational memory. Unlike e-mail discussion they are automatically associated with the relevant context.
Above: Example KIX user discussion using the KIX Document Review Plugin
during preparations of the KIX white paper. The document content was
exported to the web site using the KIX Wiki2Html Plugin.
was designed to provide
effective agile support for collaboration
between organisations of any kind and size.
The KIX framework does this by providing the following features:
- a generic document repository with local storage on each federated KIX server. The document owners control the access and the changes to their respective documents.
- a generic document version control mechanism integrated with
- generic document dependency management which can be extended to any number of federated KIX servers.
- a generic and configurable mechanism to provide automatic mappings between dependent documents.
- a generic mechanism for managing exceptions during automated processing of documents and formal knowledge. The mechanism will alert the document responsible individual or role (as configured).
- a generic configurable mechanism to automatically export documents via mappings to e.g. external documents. (This static web page is an example of such use.)
- a generic mechanism to configure functional extensions via plug-in components.
- a generic context sensitive mechanism for negotiating conflicts between different document stake holders.
- a local authorisation model applicable to each KIX server. Access to documents between KIX servers is always read-only, if allowed at all.
The overall purpose of KIX is to empower its users to achieve
collaboration capability. KIX allows its users to
configure a Collaboration Web in between them. Each node in such a
web is a dynamic document managed by KIX.
KIX will assist its users with keeping distributed sets of
interrelated documents in step with each other. Changes to one
document may ripple through to other dependent documents.
In the first instance this is done by KIX notifying each stake-holder about
changes to controlling documents and allow them to manually map the changes
to their own dependent documents. With increasing collaboration
sophistication the collaborators may use the
KIX support for evolutionary
development to agree on standards for knowledge representation
within their own domains. This will allow them
to begin the process of defining and configuring automatic
At this more sophisticated stage the interconnect of KIX web servers
will be very similar to an omnipresent distributed spreadsheet,
where each dynamic
document corresponds to one spreadsheet cell and changes to one
may automatically ripple through to the all the
dependent dynamic documents, which in turn may trigger changes to other dependent documents.
KIX is easy to extend via its component plug-in mechanism. MetaAgility is
currently developing a standard extension, which will allow the automatic mapping of formal domain knowledge (represented in RDF documents) into
e-training and e-assessment modules. In this way any well
understood business or technical
domain may be quickly codified and made available for
scalable conceptual training to those less familiar.
The first version of the new Web e-learning framework ALMA™ is
now available as a free demonstration.
Please try out ALMA.
KIX is made available free to
MetaAgility clients on
public source licence (see the Software Distribution folder).
This is to minimise client risk.
Similarly, the internal metadata on the managed
documents and their relationships are accessible in standard
n-triple format, which makes the information completely future proof.
If you are a registered client of MetaAgility Knowledge Engineering
you can read
much more about KIX here.
For more information on KIX see
- the KIX technology page,
- the MetaAgility Software Distribution page,
- the KixFw presentation website at SourceForge,
- the KIX white paper at SourceForge,
- some KixFw Screen Shots at SourceForge,
- the KIX installation instructions at SourceForge,
- the KixFw project at SourceForge,
- the KixFw Repository for KIX sources,
- KixFw at OhLoh,
- KixFw at SourceWell,
- and the KixFw blog.
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