Knowledge representation - reification and hiding

Knowledge representations are difficult to grasp, subtle in what they empower and hide, essential for sharing, but so useless for transfer of key tacit stuff

Representations both clarify and hide. Reification as text, graphic or video will enhance certain qualities, reduce or dampen others. We have no visible, tangible representation for the largest, most individual and important (tacit) part of our knowledge. Representations are material, they reify or allow ideas and experience to have an independent existence in an externalized form, they help to capture emergent thought. Like a lump of clay, a representation is tangible, it can be pointed to, passed around, played with. It takes thought experimentation one step further, eliciting new ideas.

There is a subtle trade-off at work here: the more natural the representation (e.g. stories, conversations, sketches) the lower the inference power, i.e., the ability to reason, position and manipulate. Yet it exactly these ephemeral, informal, emergent forms that assist and nurture the flow of knowledge. Passing and sharing knowledge through formal representations (e.g. rules, cases, predicate logic) is difficult, brittle and a battle to fit, find and preserve applicable context.

Our quandary is we badly need a representation to scale sharing, serve as a container, preserve emergent ideas and foster collaboration. When a representation crosses boundaries, there is a loss of meaning (reification) and context, which is counter-balanced by an opportunity for new negotiations, different views and altered meaning. This points to the importance of establishing rationale & context in use or practice, an essential non-represented aspect associated with any formalism. All representations are situated in use.

Some examples of representations are:
* Stories
* Boundary objects
* Cases
* Lessons learned
* Topic maps
* RSS feeds
* FAQs
* Patterns and anti-patterns
* Knowledge / learning objects

Representations are both important and a side track for KM work - knowing what you sacrifice when choosing and using any knowledge representation, is a subtle, invisible, often unacknowledged, and yet cardinal competence in any form of knowledge work.