Readers' Replies

Some of our reader's comments on features in our previous edition

What Difference Does A Few 000s Make?

Thanks to Denis.Bistodeau (Institut Kono) for bring to my attention a numeric error in the last newsletter:

"I just want to note that the price of acquisition by IBM is, I think, in the order of billions, not millions - IBM has acquired PwC's consulting arm for $3.5 million, should have read $3.5 billion".

Mea culpa - for devaluing the price of knowledge 1000-fold. But such price drops have happened before - though I hasten to add I donpt anticipate this for IBM! In October 1999 eToys was valued at more than $10 billion, more than its 'bricks and mortar' rival Toys 'R Us. Fast forward to May 2001. The intellectual property (including website, software, brand name and logo) of this now bankrupt company fetched just over $3 million. That's a drop of over 3000:1.

JIT Knowledge and the General Knowledge Machine

Konstantin M Golubev writes:

"Thank you for a very interesting alphabet of Knowledge Technology! I really appreciate including the term "JIT Knowledge" introduced as far as I know (please correct me if I am wrong) in my paper "Traditional + Adaptive learning = broad way to knowledge" to ISPIM (International Society for Professional Innovation Management) conference in Tokyo, Japan in 1999 (http://www.ispim.org/tokyo). You may find revised electronic version of this paper called "Adaptive learning for knowledge-based organization" at
http://gkm-ekp.sourceforge.net/gkm-ssgrr.htm."

After describing data and information, he continues:

"Knowledge is a set of holistic items directing our behavior including descriptions of typical situations and proposed actions. We really should learn knowledge to apply it in a moment and in a future. In a case of knowledge items search engines are very inefficient due to impossibility to distinguish knowledge items from plain texts. We propose a solution for this called General Knowledge Machine. It is intelligent e-knowledge base engine for any kind of knowledge-based applications supporting effective knowledge presentation, precise knowledge search, adaptive learning and immediate consulting. Please visit the open source project at http://gkm-ekp.sourceforge.net.

Thank you again for your interesting newsletters.
Best regards,

Konstantin M Golubev
General Knowledge Machine Research Group
E100 member

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