Problems, sometimes referred to as issues, and by optimists as opportunities, tend to be the primary drivers for the acquisition of knowledge. That is, knowledge is sought primarily within the context of a problem - to be applied rather than purely contemplated. Hence the view "knowledge is power."
Knowledge enables people to gain greater control or certainty of reality, and in its genetically encapsulated form, serves to improve the odds of survival of the species(2). A major advantage of the human species is its ability to utilize knowledge as a genetic prosthesis to significantly accelerate adaptation and evolution. Recently, it appears that this capability has reached an impasse which awaits the next evolutionary leap in how humans deal with knowledge.
This observation resulted from my research conducted into expertise. It became obvious that the knowledge within even a single field had grown to the point where it was unlikely that even the essential knowledge, once passed on within the course of an apprenticeship or internship, could be adequately transferred given the following concerns:
Adding to these concerns is the nature of the problems now being encountered. Until the recent past, most problems tended to be well defined, or at worst, ill defined. Now, with the most pressing issues relating to the environment and culture, significant problems are recognized as being transdisciplinary. Assuming some form of hierarchical relationship between classes of problems, humankind does not appear to be well suited to deal with the transdisciplinary class of problems, if the present state of less complex problem solving is any indication. Solutions to this class of problems will likely determine long term sustainability and quality of life, hence developing reliable means of coping is critical.
Somehow, if it was possible to map out the collective knowledge base, then it may be possible to manage transdisciplinary problems without being overwhelmed by complexity.(3) Human experts do this implicitly, much to the consternation of their protegés. This ability to synthesize and apply essential knowledge is what makes experts valuable. In order to reach this point, experts have to practice in a field for a long period of time. Experience eventually erodes the inconsequential and leaves the essential framework or knowledge map. Experts report that the ability to handle knowledge increases significantly once this plateau of essential knowledge is reached. But there is something which lay people find highly undemocratic about expertise, namely that the means by which the expert draws conclusions is not explicit and universally accessible. Knowledge mapping therefore represents an opportunity not only to solve wicked problems, but to democratize the understanding of transdisciplinary processes.
The notion of essential knowledge is best appreciated by anyone who is a novice in a knowledge based enterprise. As a novice, it would be highly useful to understand the problem within a broad context, and then to efficiently research how the particular problem, or related problems, may have been solved, or at least attempted, in the past. Libraries are not organized from this perspective, and this is why performing a literature search can more often obscure, rather than expedite, the task of contextualizing the problem.
The contextual basis for the library classification system is fields of knowledge arranged by title, subject, author and keywords. There is no category for problem solving strategies. Obtaining these from the physical data base of books, periodicals, etc. remains a relatively complex searching, parsing and natural language interpreting problem, which may not necessarily provide better quality of information to the knowledge worker. Ideally, in order to represent a mapping of the problem solving approaches, a means of tagging how various knowledge base users approached the problem in the past (not to mention knowing of anyone presently engaged in the same process at the time), would be in operation and accessible. Under the present system, it is not possible to see how a search of the knowledge base has been conducted, what information and knowledge has been extracted, and how successfully it has been applied.
Given an omniscient librarian, with access to all knowledge and information, a knowledge base user could conveniently query the system and obtain the relevant maps. The availability of such maps or views, however, implies that all users provide the collective knowledge base with a synthesis of how the knowledge was finally applied, and its outcome. To some extent, this is already happening in academia when papers are published, but these are confined for the most part to intradisciplinary problems. In order to effect knowledge mapping as a means of sustaining essential knowledge in multi and transdisciplinary enterprises, a broad based participation via an appropriate, enabling technology is needed. Users sharing such a technology would be required to act collectively as the omniscient librarian and remain responsible for mapping essential knowledge. The discussion of knowledge mapping, which follows, assumes this perspective.