Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Categorizing Knowledge
3.1
Knowledge Management
Patrick Lambe in his topic “Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and
Organizational Effectiveness” (Lambe
2007
) has beautifully depicted the way that
people use classifi cation in most of their daily functions. These classifi cations can
be as simple as recognizing the fact that during grocery shopping when we see fruits
we recognize that we are near the vegetable section to more complicated conditions
such as when we are searching for fi nding an e-mail from a specifi c person in a
specifi c project sub-folder in which all the e-mails from the people that are partici-
pating in that project have been collected.
Taxonomy is a method of organization and classifi cation of knowledge. Similar
to any other fi eld, knowledge management is an essential tool for every fi rm or
individual engaged in building design and construction in order to make the most
utilization of the existing knowledge and available resources for his benefi t. To create
such useful resources, the fi rst step is to generate or gather relevant knowledge of
the fi eld, and then, be capable to classify that in such manner that has the most
relevance to the fi rm target. Originally taxonomy was created for categorization of
species in natural science, but recently it has found its path to different areas such as
computer and business sciences as well. It has really grown to be the method of
categorization of science, information, etc. in a parent-child, or general-specifi c
pattern. In such organizations, every element in the specifi c section has all the
characteristics of the general section in addition to a few extra characteristics. For
example it can be said that all the chillers are cooling generating equipment, but all
the cooling generating equipment are not chillers. Availability of such categoriza-
tions in the fi eld of engineering would have specifi c benefi ts for the younger engi-
neers and architects in order to make them capable of capturing a better overview of
their fi eld knowledge vastness and therefore their expected responsibilities.
Without organized information the inexperienced users most likely would be
confused in fi nding proper answers to even the simplest questions such as how,
