Scale Model to Capture Knowledge

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I was visiting a museum and as I walked around I came across the most wonderful scale model of a sailing ship. The caption informed me that the King of the country had used foreign ship designers but was afraid that if they left his country he wouldn't have any drawings or plans to create his own ships. His answer was to have them create an exact replica of one of his ships, but at reduced scale. The idea was to capture the knowledge in three dimensions in the form of a scale model. I don't know why but that very early example of knowledge capture always stays with me.