Next, an overview of some common practices and techniques for knowledge transfer: Visual Languages.
General Visual Languages of wide spectrum…
Concept Maps: Based on a question (e.g.: “what caused the 2008 financial crisis?”), depicts general knowledge about that topic using concepts and their relationships on a free graph layout.
Mind Maps: Organizes ideas and knowledge around a central topic on a radial (centered hierarchy) graph layout. They commonly uses various colors, images and curved lines for easy memorization.
Entity-Relationship diagrams: On a business domain, depicts entities and thir relationship from a data modeling perspective.
Flowcharts: Depicts the logical steps for performing a task, considering processes, decisions, inputs, outputs, storing and their flow.
Unified Modeling Language: A complex language for general modeling, mostly used on computer science related projects. It has various types of diagrams. The most popular are:
- Use case diagrams: Represents the functional specification of a system. Shows the diverse functions to be executed, the relation with the actors involved and their dependencies.
- Class diagrams: Structural representation of an artifac in a static object-relational way. It depicts software elements (classes, interfaces, structures, events, etc.) and their relationships (associations, implementation, inheritance, etc.).
- Sequence diagrams: Represents the behavior of related components on the execution of a system (or subsystem). It shows the invocations, returns, paralellization, starts and stops of those participants.
Visual Languages for Specialized contexts…
Electronic Diagrams: Shows electronic components and their arrange on a circuit or board.
Chemical Diagrams: Shows the structural formula of chemical compounds at molecular level.
Military Plan: Shows the planification for war movements. It considers direction, timing, type and strength of forces in the theater of operations.
Maybe, for any human knowledge area, there are a visual language developed. Plus consider that many organizations have developed their own visual languages, and they are changing over time and evolve following the development on their industries or even creating new ones (e.g.: nanotech, genetic engineering). Such particular well focused dialects are called Domain Specific Languages.
