Knowledge

Knowledge is a form of familiarity with information from some specific area or corpus. Knowledge is often understood to be awareness of facts, having learned skills, or having gained experience using the things and the state of affairs (situations) within some area of knowledge. They call people familiar with knowledge within some area of knowledge a subject matter expert (SME).

Knowledge of facts is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification or proof.  Knowledge is objective.  Opinions and guesswork are subjective.  

In our case we are talking about certain specific knowledge, the facts that make up that knowledge, being able to create a proof to show the knowledge representation of the system is complete, consistent, and precise;  and all of this logic being put into a form readable by a machine and reach a conclusion as to whether the information in the knowledge representation is functioning properly. 

Effectively, a machine can read that knowledge within a knowledge representation and mimic understanding of that knowledge represented in a knowledge graph and the information available to both a human reader and a machine reader would be the same and therefore the human and machine should reach the same conclusion.

Knowledge must be managed.  Machine readable knowledge needs to be curated to keep it current.  This curation and management of machine readable knowledge is valuable because the machine readable rules which drive software applications are valuable.  This management and curation of rules takes effort.


There is a difference between data, information, knowledge, insight, and wisdom. Data is raw and unprocessed and tends to be understandable only in one, usually local, context.  Information is data that has been processed, classified, organized, and put into context, therefore understandable globally by anyone. Knowledge is refined and actionable information that has been further processed, organized, and/or structured in some way making the information super-useful and therefore valuable.  Insight and wisdom is even more valuable and come from applying knowledge to some specific situation such as making a decision.


Other terms for knowledge are "corpus" or "corpus of knowledge" or "body of knowledge" or "knowledge base".

Additional Information:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Overview

Image
This overview is an attempt to take the work that I have done to understand XBRL-based reports and back into a framework for explaining those reports to accountants and software engineers building software for accountants.  The sources of the information provided below are my " lab notebook " from December 2007 to October 2022; my Digital Financial Reporting blog from October 2022 until January 2025; Mastering XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting ; and finally my Seattle Method  documentation. What I have tried to do is take the seemingly hundreds of incomplete, far too technical, typically nonstandard explanations that I have come across; take the good/best ideas from each, make improvements to those explanations, and resynthesize the information into a form that is useful to me and perhaps useful to other business professionals which have a liberal arts education (i.e. not a technical oriented computer science education).  How my conclusions were reached are generall...
Read more

Complexity

Image
The world is complex.  But sometimes humans can come together, leveraging the power of agreement, and agree enough to create something useful in meeting some specific important aim and satisfying some agreed upon set of goals and objectives. A kludge is an engineering/computer science term that defines what is best described as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is typically clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain; but it gets the job done. The nautical term for a kludge is jury rig. By contrast, elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness, grace, and simplicity. The alternative to being a kludge is  elegant simplicity . Elegant simplicity is achieved through complexity via hard work an, clever ideas, etc. It is easy to create a system that is complex.  It is hard work to create a system that is simple.  People commonly confuse the terms "simple" and "simplistic". They do not describe the same thing. ...
Read more

Area of Knowledge

Image
An area of knowledge is a highly organized socially constructed aggregation of shared knowledge (a.k.a. corpus) for a distinct subject matter.  Subject matter experts (SMEs) create, use, and maintain an area of knowledge. An area of knowledge has a specialized insider vocabulary, underlying assumptions (axioms, theorems, constraints, assertions, restrictions), and persistent open questions that have not necessarily been resolved (i.e. flexibility is necessary).  You can think about an area of knowledge as being characterized in a spectrum with two extremes: Kind area of knowledge: clear rules, lots of patterns, lots of rules, repetitive patterns, and unchanging tasks. Wicked area of knowledge: obscure data, few or no rules, constant change, and abstract ideas. Stakeholders of a system need to be in agreement as to an undisputed core knowledge of an area of knowledge. Sensemaking is the process of determining the knowledge, or deeper meaning or significance or essence, of the c...
Read more