Skip to main content

Knowledge Curation (KC)

Government agencies, businesses and scientific organisations are swimming in data, but cannot leverage the power of that data to create better outcomes because the data is not connected or catalogued. 

SURROUND enables overwhelming amounts of data to no longer be overwhelming to manage. We help you to know how your critical data is structured so you can rapidly locate and re-use the right data to create and improve knowledge. 

SURROUND’s Knowledge Curation uses global standards to provide a capability for organisations to improve precision and consistency in knowledge categorisation by managing and integrating the set of knowledge categories across the organisation, across time, for both people and machines. 

KC categorises a comprehensive range of knowledge assets in a controlled and consistent manner, including:

  • Words and phrases - controlled lists, vocabularies, taxonomies, glossaries etc
  • Processes
  • Legislation
  • Policies and procedures
  • Documents and images in various formats
  • Financial assets (at the chart of accounts level)

Redefining data asset management through inductive and deductive reasoning

SURROUND’s data catalogues can be built deductively (top-down – ingesting the data into the catalogue) and inductively (bottom-up – building the catalogue from the data). 

Transforming internal and external, structured or unstructured data assets into manageable formats, Catalogue Management is an advanced, easily-deployable tool for managing organisations’ valuable internal and external knowledge assets. Redefining data asset management.

Catalogue Management is deployed as a web application that reads and enhances catalogue content from one or more sources, and presents it online, both as a human-readable web page, and a machine-readable data source.

Out-of-the box Catalogue Management supports 25 item types, with the potential to be extended based on organisation-specific needs. It may also be customised to catalogue any type of item, such as datasets, software, spatial datasets, file types, and models. 

Catalogue Management complements and integrates seamlessly with Vocabulary Curation - although the two are not dependent on each other - to produce game-changing improvements to your catalogue system. Benefit: if a controlled vocab is in advanced search, used, you can search for a definition ….. a component of facetted search.

SURROUND’s Knowledge Curation incorporates FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) for the life cycle management of data catalogues and knowledge assets in their particular context. This precise and accurate categorisation and structured cataloguing of data provides the following benefits:

  • Rapid and simplified access to the right data 
  • Adherence to to the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) and other standards
  • Similar datasets are located under the same category headings
  • Knowledge gaps are more easily discernible
  • Valuable knowledge assets can be shared between stakeholders who have access to the same data catalogue, and as a consequence:
    • Data catalogues can be harmonised
    • Machines can answer more complex questions when data catalogues can be presented as a knowledge graph

SURROUND’s data catalogues can be visualised against a range of spatial backgrounds, for instance:

  • Number of documents that are held across particular offices
  • References of documents to places or points of interests on a map

Data catalogues can be mapped to reflect temporal changes: for example, a 2007 view of the data catalogue versus the 2021 view of the data catalogue.

Knowledge is managed on a life cycle basis to take into account of:

  • changes of knowledge categories over time:
    • introduction of new knowledge categories (for example: cyber-psychological manipulation)
    • disuse of knowledge categories (for example: relating to obsolete technologies) 
  • differences in indexing knowledge assets according to individual or organisational preference:
    • for example, one music-lover may categorise their CD collection according to label, while another does so according to music genre)