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 is facts and information.  Knowledge of facts is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification or proof.  Knowledge is objective.  Opinions and guesswork are subjective.  Skills are reliable patterns of behavior and action. Knowledge is discernable.

Not all knowledge is equal.  Explicit knowledge is knowledge that is easy to articulate, write down, and share. Explicit knowledge is objective, documented, and easily shared information and tends to be found in manuals, reports, documents, and books. Explicit knowledge is formalized and codified.  Implicit knowledge is the application of explicit knowledge. Skills that are transferable from one job to another are one example of implicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is gained from unique personal experience that is more difficult to express and tends to be unwritten. Tacit knowledge tends to be more nuanced, experience-based information like intuition or a learned skill that is hard to articulate and understand. Tacit knowledge tends to be important subtleties and nuances that takes deep understanding to get right.

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. Know-how is the skill and ability to do something correctly. Know-what is the skill and ability to understand correctly what to do.

There are different types of knowledge.  Propositional knowledge relates to propositions or claims or facts.  Practical knowledge relates to skills. Knowledge by acquaintance relates to familiarity of something through experience, training, or research.

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".

Intersubjectivity refers to the shared cognitive understanding and mutual knowledge that people have when they communicate information and interact with each other. Intersubjective things exist in the exchange of information. Things like laws, financial reporting rules, the idea of the "corporation", the idea of "countries", the idea of "money" are all intersubjective things that do not exist in nature, but you need that intersubjectivity in order to achieve mutual cognitive agreement and understanding.

So if you think of a financial statement. Imagine an "Investor" looking at the notion of "assets" on the financial statement of "Entity A" and also on the financial statement of "Entity B". This system can only be effective if the cognitive understanding of "assets" is the same for all three parties. Mutual understandings of agreement or disagreement.


This shared understanding helps people connect, collaborate, and build networks of understanding effectively. These groups operate effectively because of this shared understanding. When understanding can be represented in machine-readable form a completely new medium of exchanging information can exist and entirely new possibilities open up. Virtuous cycles can be created by discussing agreement and disagreement with respect to the knowledge within an area of knowledge..

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