You look upon the multitude of loose notes, notebooks, electronic documents, digital spreadsheets either piling on your desk or scattered among your hard drive and you think, there must be a better way. Model Based Systems Engineering, at its essence, is built on a coherent source of truth from which you can slice and dice all you want but the truth remains. Why not apply the MBSE approach not only to Systems, those man-made things of steel, electrons and bytes, but to Knowledge itself?

There are many excellent Books of Knowledge out there including the Project Management BOK (PMBOK), Systems Engineering BOK (SEBOK) and the biggest of them all, Wikipedia, however they have some fundamental deficiencies not because of their content but because architecture - an architecture built around documents.

Documents and webpages are views of information from particular viewpoints (for example look up 'trigonometry' on wikipedia), maybe asking slightly different questions (and offering the answer) about the the main topic. Deficiencies of a document, connected or otherwise, include:

1. Change management and propagation is difficult
2. Inevitable inconsistencies between terms and definition (e.g. processes, frameworks, methods)
3. Static nature of documents means that a reader would need to either 'stitch' together different viewpoints, 'generalize' a document if too specific or 'specialize' a document if too general. Rarely would you find a document that satisfies your use case.

At Fitzgerald Systems applied systems thinking is at the core of what we do. That's why we are using a novel model approach to develop a repository for knowledge that serves as the single source of truth, from which documents and webpages are generated.

Our vision is to develop a model of knowledge that a first grader and a research professor can easily take different viewpoints from the same concept and derive value.

The repository is maintained in XMI format on github/fitzgeraldsystems. Automatically generated documentation can be found on fitzgeraldsystems/model. Notes that support the model are maintained in this wiki.

A node lived on a page.