tigressse

For friends following me on twitter, I have sometimes tweeted about Knowledge Plaza…

Today, let me briefly introduce you to a tool I have been using these last months. It’s brilliant and far the best knowledge management and social search platform I have ever used.

Knowledge Plaza empowers members of the same workspaces to share and manage internet bookmarks, documents, files, e-mails, contacts, as well as their own expertise.

It’s an all in one product; at the same time

• a social networking
• a social bookmarking
• a document & file repository
• a social team search engine
• a wiki

Here are the top 4 features I felt in love of

• Full text search.
• Mosaic* concept: Public Mosaics I share with others and private Mosaics where I collect and organize my knowledge, my works.
• Mosaic export: a zip file containing a set of folders (files, websites and contacts) and a pdf with an overview of the mosaic including all wiki pages, websites thumbnails and an overview of every tiles associated to the mosaic. Clic the export button and you have your report, easy and simple!
• And above all, the “I am a Search Engine”, everyone in the plaza can be used as a Search Engine. It’s more efficient and less time consuming to search info directly inside an expert’s repository (expert as a search engine).

To help me write my previous post about usage of social media and web 2.0 tools by high education institutions, I decided first to create a mosaic - University 2.0 Mosaic* in my private workspace - and started collecting and organizing info around the topic. See the screenshot below. Thus, the University 2.0 post was born.

As a science and research 2.0 enthusiast, I also share a mosaic around web 2.0 tools for scientists and researchers.

Here is a sample of websites I have bookmarked and stored in the Research 2.0 Mosaic.

Now, imagine international projects involving researchers from all over the world with a number of different expertise (or simply local projects inside a lab), it can be very hard to collaborate around a same project and manage tons of info, or write a paper involving many co-authors. Knowledge Plaza makes the collaboration between researchers easy and the lab/expert’s knowledge available for the whole community at the same time.

The following demo on the climate change can help to grab the concepts and the main features of Knowledge Plaza.

* Useful basic definitions

• A tile: piece of information. ie: emails, documents, websites, contacts, references, etc.
• A mosaic : is where you package knowledge to collaborate, annotate, share and export. A collection of tiles organized and discussed around a theme. ie: climate change, etc.

** A product from Whatever Company, see their website.