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Knowledge Architecture

How OGM thinks about knowledge tools, and which ones it actually uses or has explored.

The frame

OGM's The Five Layers include "Knowledge" as one of five — described as "mining, mapping, organization of knowledge" and "moving up and down the DIKW hierarchy."

There's a stated typology of knowledge in OGM Structure/OGM Infrastructure (Evolving).md:

Understanding kinds of knowledge:

  • Somatic, scientific, folk wisdom
  • Social norms and processes
  • Anti-knowledge, misinformation

So OGM treats knowledge architecture as more than information architecture — it's about which kinds of knowing are made addressable.

The atomic unit: Nuggets

The most distinctive concept is the Nugget, drawn from Jerry Michalski's Brain and elaborated in Information Tools/Nuggets, Narratives, and Points of View.md:

"It's best if nuggets are 'free-standing' — understandable in the different contexts in which it finds itself"

Peter Kaminski calls nuggets micro-narratives

The page itself is short (Orphan Gems flags it as referenced 4 times but underdeveloped), but the Nugget concept undergirds a lot of OGM's information work:

The structure: Narratives and Points of View

From the same page: nuggets are organized into narratives, and narratives are organized by a point of view. This is invoked but not elaborated in the source — see Orphan Gems.

Concrete tools used and considered

From Information Tools/Overview of Information Tools.md and Information Tools/Lists of Tools.md:

Wikis and notes:

Mind maps and brains:

Diagramming:

Project / coordination:

Real-time:

Other:

The wiki itself as architecture

Admin and Help/How We Wiki/ is one of the most developed sub-areas of the source — it's metadocumentation that names the wiki's own techniques:

"Incipient Links - links to things that don't exist yet... are just as important as a page. You can make them, without stopping your train of thought, and they will be there as placeholders." — Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md

This is a distinctive editorial stance: don't pause to build a stub, just point and keep moving. The cost is many True Orphans and Orphan Gems in the source. The benefit is that writing isn't blocked on indexing.

Page maturity

Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md proposes (but doesn't finalize) a tree life-cycle metaphor for page maturity: seed, sprout, seedling, sapling, adult, elderly, snag, rotting log. This metaphor isn't in active use across the source — most pages don't carry maturity tags — but the framing is suggestive of how OGM thinks about content evolution.

Knowledge repositories OGM tracks

From Brain/Knowledge Repositories for Collective Intelligence.md:

Related

Sources:

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