The dramatic reduction of memory and storage cost in computers and the increase in their speed and capacity are dramatically changing the way information is stored across companies. While in the past, medium size, mainly textual, centralised archives used to be the only resources for knowledge management, nowadays large companies handle very large quantities of multimedia information in distributed archives. The number and size of these archives is reaching sizes unimaginable even some years ago.

 

Large organisations’ intranets have reached the dimension of mini Webs, connecting thousands of computers and having reached dimensions of dozens of millions of documents; it is expected that soon they will reach hundreds of millions of pages, i.e. a dimension comparable to the Internet at the end of the 90s. The knowledge contained in these pages is generally related to the organisation of the company, containing best practice descriptions, user manuals, procedural and legal information, and contains both relatively organised material and sparse one derived from people interaction in discussion lists, wikis, blogs.  Moreover the increased use of the WWW as a source of information has made the boundary between intra- and inter-net very thin. This dramatically increases the dimension of the information space.

 

Databases and archives are used to store huge amounts of information that is vital for the organisation life, such as data on products, financial information, etc.  For example a typical jet engine produces about 1Gbyte of vibration data per flight; if irregularities are found, part of the data is stored. Every time an engine is serviced, financial information is produced. If problems are found, pictures are taken, reports are written. Each individual engine has a potential “folder” of information describing the whole lifecycle of the engine that can easily sum up to several Gigabytes of information, potentially Terabytes and contains highly interrelated information stored in different media.