Out of the box – A life with rubbish information

an article by Roger James (Visiting Professor, University of Southampton) published in Business Information Review Volume 28 Number 3 (September 2011)

Abstract

Technology has been largely responsible for the revolution in information science and knowledge management over the last decade. The initial implementations, limited by technology, were concerned with content management which extended and reinforced the focus on structured, encoded and abstract material. Recently technology has extended its impact to massive, extensive messaging – or social media. Whilst social media has simply expanded available content, a more profound shift is to the new capability to manage context: recognizing the patterns of activity as a new source of information.

Context management has great potential to address complex, often social, questions providing new insights which we present in a new science of context management. Context management opens up new possibilities in productively using ‘information waste’ – perhaps collected for different purposes or as a by-product of a transactional system – and we predict new companies will emerge from the use of information waste.

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