Our philosophy

Our goal is to make solutions in the areas of content management, knowledge management and learning management (CAL software) for the modern information society. Choices of technology are dependant of this goal.

Currently, our solutions are mainly based on the Topic Maps standard. Topic Maps has attributes that makes it particularly well suited to support good learning processes, intuitive and affective ways of navigating documented knowledge. Topic Maps is a technology that enables the knowledge structures themselves work as a map (or an index) of the knowledge. Hence the map is automatically updated as knowledge is acquired and knowledge structures are built. This opens the way for dynamic indexing, which has a positive effect on navigation and overview.

Everything in Topic Maps is centerec around topics, occurrences and associations. A topic can be anything (often with a name assigned to it, e.g. 'Mr. Jones'), occurrences are resources related to the topics (e.g. a CV for Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones' phone number, etc. ), and associations show the relations between the topics. If thinking of bits of knowledge being documented through topics and occurences, the associations will show how the bits relate, and hence making the foundation for a knowledge structure. Acknowledging that relating bits of knowledge to build a knowledge structure in itself gives new knowledge, one will also build a structure that is based directly on the knowledge itself, usable for navigatition (the assoctiations).

In a situation of learning this is especially useful, as most people do learn by building associative knowledge structures during the learning process. By documenting the knowledge in a tool that is based on Topic Maps, it will be easy to see how the knowledge is developed. It also gives possibilities for using this documentation later on (e.g. as a reference, for repetition, evaluation, etc.).

To learn more about topic maps, we recommend the 'Topic Maps starter pack', that can be downloaded for free from Ontopia's web site.

Solutions

We use Ontopia Knowledge Suite (OKS) from Ontopia AS as topic maps engine, e.g. for our main product, BrainBank. The OKS lets you build and manipulate topic maps, using Java technology (among other things).

We do also build solutions on more traditional technology, like web application/database (e.g. using Java and PostgreSQL).

What technical solutions to choose will depend on the goal of the product and the customer's preferences.