Reference
The vocabulary and mental models behind IKE.
A concise reference for the terms, distinctions, and explanation frames that make Intentional Knowledge Engineering easier to teach and remember.
Glossary
Core terms
IKE needs a small, consistent vocabulary because it is naming a practice most organizations perform only accidentally.
Intentional Knowledge Engineering. The practice of intentionally designing and operating organizational knowledge systems.
Intentional Knowledge System. The instantiated operational system produced through IKE practices.
Intentional Knowledge Operations. The ongoing work of creating, reconciling, validating, curating, and evolving organizational knowledge.
The collective operational understanding of an organization across humans, systems, documentation, processes, and AI agents.
The inevitable divergence of operational understanding from operational reality over time.
A bounded, reusable artifact tied to a process, asset, role, decision, failure mode, or operating condition.
Frameworks
Reusable mental models for understanding IKE.
These frames help distinguish IKE from ordinary documentation, knowledge capture, AI retrieval, and dependence on tribal memory.
Tribal vs intentional
Expert knowledge is valuable. The problem is unstructured dependence on individual memory.
Tacit to operationalized
Knowledge moves from hidden practice to captured artifact to validated object to operational use.
Event to knowledge object
Incidents, startups, shutdowns, and handovers become reusable knowledge instead of fading into conversation.
Accidental vs intentional flow
The same event can become memory loss or organizational learning depending on how it is handled.
Knowledge Layer map
People, systems, docs, histories, processes, and AI form one operational understanding layer.
Drift and reconciliation
Knowledge is not kept true by storage. It is kept true by recurring correction against reality.
Short statements
- Tribal knowledge does not scale. Intentional knowledge does.
- Organizations already have a knowledge system. Most are accidental.
- AI readiness begins with intentional knowledge.
- Knowledge Drift is inevitable. Reconciliation must be intentional.
- Knowledge is infrastructure.
Archive boundary
IKE evolved from earlier KOL, KOR, and KOS language. Those materials are historical source material. Public IKE content should translate durable ideas into IKE vocabulary instead of presenting the older project names as the current framework.