I've been holidaying in New Zealand for the past week, although I did give a presentation to the New Zealand Knowledge Management Network. I spent most of my time in and around Wellington, which meant that I did the mandatory Lord of the Rings tour. This tour got me thinking about the value of "knowledge". Why?

Well there was no doubt our guide was knowledgeable. What he didn't know about J.R. Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books, how and where the films were made, or Peter Jackson the film director, probably wasn't worth knowing. I certainly didn't want or need to know more! In fact his depth of knowledge on this narrow subject was astounding. For example he found linkages I hadn't appreciated, and in many cases didn't care about. It was all a bit much though when he started speaking Elvish . The guide was even telling me that people come on the tour and spend the whole day conversing exclusively in Elvish! I have enough trouble with English, and can barely speak Pidgin English and Hebrew both languages spoken by millions, let alone learning a synthetic language. So is Elvish a representation of knowledge, and if it is is it valuable?

Well this introduces the hoary old question of what is knowledge, but it also introduces the philosophical disciplines of ontology, epistemology and axiology. Ontology is the philosophy of the world view of reality. Sometimes, and in particular in the systems thinking schools, world view is called ‘weltanschauung'. The seminal ontological question is - ‘Is there a "real" world out there that is independent of our knowledge of it?'

I am happy to enter into a discourse on “what is knowledge” but that is not the intent of this post. Rather I want to explore the idea that knowledge representation is becoming more visual. In his 1997 book ‘The Measure of Reality ’ Emeritus Professor Alfred Crosby suggested that visualisation and measurement were the two factors most responsible for the rapid development of all of modern science. Now this is an interesting proposition, and one I think I largely agree with.

The first attempts to represent knowledge were probably pictorial, and can be seen in the elegant cave paintings of our ancestors. Indeed some of these are still maintained by indigenous people today – see for example the Aboriginal rock art of the Gagudju people of Northern Australia, one of the oldest cultures on the planet. Numerals and text soon followed and have been the mainstay of knowledge representation for at least the last 6,000 years. But is this changing?