Bob Bater

by Bob Bater
(Bristol, UK)

Qualifying as an information scientist in the late 1970s, Bob Bater has had frequent cause to use his professional knowledge of classification and indexing in the field of knowledge and information management. Since forming InfoPlex Associates (www.infoplex-uk.com) in 1994, Bob has made a speciality of business activity analysis using techniques drawn from Soft Systems Methodology. Business activity analysis and modelling are at the core of his Knowledge Mapping methodology, which employs such techniques as Rich Pictures, Information Distribution Matrices and Information Flow Diagrams, as well as his own extension of standard business process modelling techniques to enable the depiction of knowledge, skill and information as inputs to business activities. These First Order and Second Order Knowledge Mapping stages map explicit and tacit knowledge respectively.

Projects in recent years have included knowledge mapping and expertise directory pilot projects for London Underground Ltd. (LUL), metadata architecture for a large-scale EDRM implementation for the European Investment Bank, a faceted taxonomy for an EDMS implementation for LUL, an enterprise taxonomy for the UK Home Office and support for legacy know-how system taxonomy development and cross-mapping for London-based law firms Freshfield, Bruckhaus Deringer and Simmons & Simmons. Bob has also offered a variety of training workshops over the last ten years, being retained by Aslib in London to co-present their 'Knowledge Mapping' seminar thrice yearly since 1999. He also currently runs two further workshops for Aslib, 'Building and Deploying a Corporate Taxonomy' and 'Knowledge Architecture: An Exploratory Workshop'.

Bob is author of the 2005 Ark Group report 'KM in the legal profession' and co-author of 'Intangible Value at Work', an essay published by Chandos Publishing in a collection entitled 'KM: Social, Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives'. He presented a paper on Third Order Knowledge Mapping at the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) workshop in Vienna, Austria in September 2005(http://www2.db.dk/nkos2005/Bob%20Bater.pdf).

Bob is a chartered member of the UK library and information science professional organization CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals), a professional member of the British Computer Society, and is Vice-Chair of ISKO UK, the UK chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (site: www.iskouk.org; blogs: http://iskouk.blogspot.com/, http://iskouk.wordpress.com/).