Personal knowledge management - Beyond versioning

The Internet enables new ways of learning, and offers new possibilities to access an enormous amount of information and knowledge. The challenge for students is no longer to get access to information, but to select the right one and to deal with the information and knowledge overflow. To support learning processes in the changed environment our approach suggests the application of personal knowledge management methodologies and software systems. The current personal knowledge and information management tools encounter many problems within the area of knowledge fragmentation as well as within the knowledge of the knowledge formation process. The chosen approach to overcome these problems is an intelligent intermediate layer. This layer needs to fulfil two requirements; first, it needs to understand and be able to handle and logically defragment the full content, metadata and the associated relationships which exist between the pieces of our personal knowledge. Second, it needs to remember and trace the different steps our knowledge pieces have gone through. This will offer a holistic view on the knowledge formation process, allowing a system independent replication of the undertaken actions, going back some steps to a previous version, and continuing in a different direction from there on without losing the already won inputs. To capture the holistic view, the consideration of parallel knowledge activities and their level of influence on the outcome need to be reflected.