Knowledge Bricks and the Story of the Three Little Pigs

The Three Little Pigs is a fable about three pigs who build their houses of different materials. A Big Bad Wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses which are made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house that is made of bricks.

This three little pigs analogy can help you think about the construction of your enterprise knowledge graphs.

In his article, Data is the new Mud, Mike Dillinger, PhD brings forth the notions of "knowledge bricks" and "soaring towers or sprawling castles"; but also the notion that the data architectures of enterprises are problematic, like mud.  In a prior post, I used the analogy of the freemason of the information age.  Putting these ideas together, this is what I see.

I pointed out in my freemasons blog post that a brick wall is made of exactly two things: bricks, mortar.  Mike Dillinger points out, correctly, that you still need to create good bricks.  Basically, the brick making process is important.  You cannot create anything out of the mud itself, you have to convert that mud to bricks; but you also still need to understand how to build the walls.

In another blog post, I mention (paraphrasing) that this is a problem of (a) control and (b) enabling business professionals to have that control. Solving this problem is hard but very possible with deliberate, rigorous work.

The "bricks" and the "wall" need to be created by business professionals.  It is business professionals that understand the problem(s) that need to be solved.  But business professionals don't tend to have the skills and experience with knowledge engineering or information technology.  I see that as the "mortar" to follow my analogy.

So, in yet another blog post, I mention a framework for building bricks and walls.  And in yet one other blog post, I point out that per the Law of Conservation of Complexity; while complexity cannot be removed from a system...complexity can be moved.  A software application or software platform can absorb complexity so the user of the software does not need to deal with that complexity.

Getting back to the story of the three little pigs.  If a little pig does not understand best practices then it is highly likely that the little pig will take the wrong approach to build their house.  But if the little pig was provided with some guidance and good tools, there is a better chance when when the big bad wolf comes around; the house will stand up.

To help these little pigs get the best result, it seems that what they could use might be things like:

  1. High-level model.  High level models they can plug their lower level models into. This is sort of like a "brick making machine" maybe.
  2. Tools.  Good tools that have best practices built into the tool. This is sort of like a tool that is specialized at building bricks and another tool that is specialized at building brick walls.
  3. Guidance.  So think about a recipe.  A recipe to cook a meal is not just a list of ingredients.  If you gave a trained chef and a guy like me the same list of ingredients, there would be two completely different results.  Guidance needs to be provided for those that have the skills and experience; in their terms. The more guidance that is baked into the tools and models the better.
  4. Blueprints.  Blueprints are necessary.  What is that "soaring tower" or "sprawling castle" to be used for? What good is it?
  5. Coordination of a team.  Seems that to get the best result of what you put into that blueprint you need a coordinated team.  You need (a) subject matter experts for an area of knowledge that needs the tower/castle, (b) knowledge engineers that understand how to best mix the mortar and the best approach to creating bricks to use, and (c) information technology professionals that also contribute to the mortar and maybe even they contribute to the brick creation process.
Controlling all of the above effectively enables the creation of elegant, beautiful, graceful "soaring towers" or "sprawling castles" that satisfy the needs of their use case.  If someone wants to be like pig 3 then they can and when the big bad wolf comes a huffing and puffing; the towers and/or castles can withstand that event.

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