Knowledge Model Introduction
Kobai doesn't need you to invest days of data modeling to be able to use it, our approach allows to focus on a few important questions that need to be answered and build the Knowledge Model as you need it.
Best Practices
Kobai is designed to let you start small with focused efforts to get something useful quickly. From a modelling perspective, that means there is no need to model everything you know about a given domain right away. Instead, we suggest having 2-5 questions you want to answer in the back of your mind. Ask yourself what pieces about your domain you would need to consider to answer the questions, then model just those for now. When you get to your 8th question and discover you need to make the model more complex, you can easily return to adding concepts and properties.
Terminology
Kobai’s Knowledge Model is composed of some key terms:
- Domain - While all concepts within your knowledge model can be connected to any other, domains are used to logically group related concepts to organize your model.
- Concept - A piece of the model that you want to know something about. Often it's useful to think of the big circles you’d draw on a whiteboard if you had to explain a topic to someone. These aren’t individual pieces of data, but more complex constructs representing important business topics. For example: Locations, People, Purchase Orders, Engines and Maintenance Events are all typical concepts.
- Property - These are individual data fields that provide details about a concept. Names, timestamps, temperatures, postal code are all potential examples.
- Relationship - These are relationships between concepts that connect them. Their names give them meaning, and two concepts can be connected by more than one relationships with different meaning. For example, the concepts Person and Building could be connected by relationships called “LivesIn”, “Owns”, and “FormerlyLivedIn” which all have different meanings that can exist simultaneously.