Knowledge as a Reusable Asset

Knowledge is an asset.  In fact, knowledge is our greatest asset.  Knowledge is an accumulation of your education and experience.  Your skills and abilities are knowledge assets.

Knowledge can be represented in machine-readable form.  As an example, here is knowledge of AASB 1060 which is a financial reporting scheme represented as an XBRL taxonomy.  That knowledge is effectively the terms, associations between terms, rules, structures, and such.

According to the Business Rules Manifesto, article 4; business rules should be represented in declarative form: "Rules should be expressed declaratively in natural-language sentences for the business audience."

Rules, in my view, can be represented or supported by an NFT or non-fungible token. To better understand NFTs, please see this document that explains the top 30 use cases of NFTs in the enterprise.

Knowledge must be managed.  Machine readable knowledge needs to be curated to keep it current.  This curation and management has value of machine readable knowledge is valuable because the machine readable rules are valuable.  This management and curation of rules takes effort.

Machine readable rules drive things like expert systems.  For example, see this expert system for creating financial reports.  If you don't understand expert systems, think of how CAD/CAM software changed how architects and builders work. Expert systems is an approach to constructing software.  These expert systems need to be easy for business professionals to make use of. And they will be.

Software can leverage what is known as a rules engine to process the machine readable rules to provide the functionality that drives something like an expert system.  You don't necessarily need a rules engine per se, but a rules engine is a very efficient way to write the code that processes the rules that drives the knowledge based expert system. But here are reasons to use a rules engine.

Auditchain Pacioli is a rules engine that is purpose built for processing business reports and in particular financial reports.

The flywheel is turning slowly, but it is picking up speed steadily. Listen to this NPR story about the role of skill, experience, and experimentation in innovation: Rebel With a Cause. Why it pays to break the rules in work and life.  The best experimentation is done with those that have skills and experience in the area that they are experimenting in.