The Vision Behind CDS

PKM and knowledge work in general will move away from the tight coupling of "one formalism to one tool" and instead move to generic formalisms that can be edited in a number of tools. Such generic formalisms allow new scientific or personal insights as well as providing cheaper ways for storing, retrieving and transforming knowledge.

In an ideal future world, a broad number of PKM tools (or simply tools used for PKM tasks) can export their data as CDS models and import from CDS models. A tool that does not understand the semantics of some Relations simply falls back to process it as the next super-Relation that it can handle. As an example, the CDS model exported by a tagging-aware application might use the Relation [has tag] to export the assignment from a file to a tag. The importing application might not understand [has tag] but [has annotation]. So it renders the tag assignments as annotations (e. g., as call-outs in a mind-map). The user can edit the tag names here. Later, the knowledge model can be re-opened in the first application with correctly renamed tags, which still used the [has tag] Relation. Of course, newly added tags would become merely annotations as the creating should not create Statements with Relations which’s consequences it cannot understand. Documents, presentations and outlines can be generated from personal knowledge models.

In a next cultural step, documents are no longer exchanged. Instead, knowledge models are published and interlinked in a fine-granular manner to other people’s work. Academia moves away from documents and focuses more on distributed, formal argumentation. Schools start to teach modelling with the same rigour as reading, writing and math. The global population shifts their cognitive limits, sees new solutions to old problems or better arguments for old solutions to old problems.