I turned my mind to this because in our CBDI-SAE Knowledgebase we have huge repository of SOA knowledge, and even as a contributor I don't always easily find what I am looking for. So what hope for a customer!
The KB has a search engine, menu hierarchies and lots of topic based portals. But it definitely takes work to unlock the value, and we are all busy people and we need efficient mechanisms to find what we need now!
It occurred to me that the concept of a View might be useful. The KB does have stakeholder and work package Views. But it doesn't have Views that relate directly to goals which perhaps more directly reflect what KB users are tasked with doing. As a consequence I developed the idea of a series of Use Cases. For each use case I modeled Actors, Processes and Capability. I modeled the Use Cases in Powerpoint and added links to the Capabilities and published as a PDF. You can see the result here.
If you are already a KB user you will (I hope) recognize some of the Use Cases as being relevant and be able to immediately find resources that may accelerate your work package delivery. If you are not a KB user yet, you may still find value in this set of models a) it provides a goal based picture of capabilities you may require regardless of source or b) it may interest you to look further at the KB and to utilize it further.
Finally therefore I wonder why search engines don't utilize a model along these lines by providing focused search arguments. Take a look at the Google advanced search. It merely asks you to provide more "words". Yes it provides some conditionality, but surely it would be more effective to ask context questions in a straightforward manner that everyone would be able to answer such as:
"what are you doing?"
"what is your role?"
"what is your objective"
and thereby deliver narrowly targeted results.
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