The KIX development was started in order to fill an obvious gap in the support for distributed collaborations. The idea was to properly support collaborating communities with a well integrated and extensible tool. This was perceived as potentially very important since
- win-win collaboration is more and more necessary for the creation of human wealth
- due to increased specialisation based on the growing distribution of
- knowledge and skills as well as
- resources and capacity
- the urgent need for development and refinement of better knowledge
- increased business knowledge through fast feedback from business processes
- increased scientific knowledge through fast feedback from studies and experiments
- improved engineering through precise feedback from the development of and the real life use of products and services.
- the urgent need for dissemination of existing knowledge
- todays global challenges require fast and scalable use of existing and new knowledge.
KIX was designed to provide a comprehensive framework for the development of, the refinement of, and the distributed use of knowledge, as well as the effective distribution of existing knowledge.
How to Support Collaborative Integration
The following application goals guided the design and development of KIX:
- generic and scalable tool
- support all domains where no integrated decision support exists today
- framework to support stake-holders with distributed dependencies
- fast work-flows for processing of changes
- automated feed-forward of change on dependencies
- flexible processing of changes - manual, semiautomated or automated
- precise exception handling during automatic handling and targeted archiving of the reports
- effective feedback from proposed and implemented changes
- fast threaded web conferences precisely tied to the stake-holder's context
- framework for organisational memory
- remember WHY decisions were made even after people have left
- base for sensible work incentives
- affordable technology
As simple as possible...
The live online KIX document, which supports distributed dependencies through the publisher-subscriber model, and with associated online discussion forums, is probably the simplest solution, which does the required job. Thus KIX is as simple as possible but no simpler.
As cheap as possible...
- KIX is affordable by the part-time 'garage' business.
- KIX should help to save cost in large and complex global operations through the faster making of decisions, which themselves should be of higher precision and quality.
As flexible as possible...
KixFw is a Model-View-Control framework.
- The built-in KIX document model can be extended via KIX plugins.
- As a result the document view (i.e. display) can be made to depend on the document type and the task at hand.
- The document processing and control can be adjusted similarly.
The peer-to-peer communication between KIX servers is based on the X3P protocol, which is extensible and negotiating. These protocol properties are essential in order to allow for asynchronous upgrades in a distributed community of KIX servers.
As fast as possible...
The KixFw is implemented in perl. This implementation could of course be improved. However, in comparison with a situation with no proper support for work-flow during integrated decision making, KIX provides a marked improvement; stake-holders are notified within seconds of relevant KIX events.
KIX Promotes Core Internet Values
- KIX is distributed
- KIX is scalable
- KIX is extensible
- KixFw is an extensible framework
- KIX peer-to-peer communication is based on an extensible protocol
- KIX is open
- KixFw sources are open (GPL)
- KIX is solely based on open standards and open protocols
Oxford, UK. November 11 in 2008.
Sverker Griph