Summary: KMI is the lead academic partner in the Compendium Institute, a not-for-profit virtual organisation developing the Compendium approach to the mapping and management of information, ideas, and arguments.

KMi conducts research into the practices that emerge around the kind of real time and asynchronous knowledge mapping enabled by Compendium, and the new possibilities that knowledge media open up for collective sensemaking and organizational memory.

The Compendium hypermedia tool is a visual environment for collaborative, semiformal modelling. It extends Rittel's Issue-Based Information System (IBIS), from his original vision of supporting discussion about wicked problems (a skill now taught as Dialogue Mapping), to support for collective sensemaking more broadly. Compendium's hypertext functionality is a critical addition to the issue-based notation derived from IBIS, and its Java-based open architecture has enabled interoperability with other database and collaboration technologies (see the Community Showcase). Click the screenshots to read the news stories about these Compendium applications.

How we got here: The Compendium approach was developed initially in the mid-1990s by Al Selvin & Maarten Sierhuis in NYNEX Science & Technology, as an issue-based "conversational modelling" approach for integrating formal modelling approaches such as CommonKADS and World Modelling, with other diverse content. This extended the work of Jeff Conklin whose gIBIS and QuestMap systems pioneered the use of semantic hypertext to represent issue networks in the late-1980s/early-90s, building on the formative work of Horst Rittel in the 1970s on an "argumentative" approach to tackling wicked problems.

In the mid-1990s, this strand of work converged with the design rationale, argumentation and organizational memory research conducted by Simon Buckingham Shum when he came to KMi.

The KMi team working with Simon is now Al Selvin (Director, External Portals and eLearning at Verizon, and PhD Student), Michelle Bachler (Java programmer), Clara Mancini (Research Fellow), Alexandra Okada (Visiting PhD Student), and continuing to work closely with Compendium's core team of Maarten Sierhuis (NASA Ames) and Jeff Conklin (CogNexus Institute).