Nirmal Merchant

If you have read my post "The Final Question", you well understand the primary inspiration for this article. How can we conserve knowledge in a way that it is easily accessible and reused so that one does not have to reinvent the wheel? It is this re-inventing of the wheel that is probably wasting millions of dollars for businesses world wide. So I attempt in my own small way to understand this quest and wonder if I could contribute anything..

Lets first start with the question.. What is Knowledge? We can probably derive from those who have attempted to answer this question... Graphically put

The arrows indicate the process of analysis, derivation and conclusion. Data is plain stimulus. It is a packet of native properties of an entity that are just there. Data becomes information when they are presented in a comprehensible manner.. in other words if you cannot comprehend it, its not informative. Information may be useful or useless as once who browses the web can well understand. Knowledge is when we process usefull information to arrive at an understanding of the working of the entity. It is when we discover the process which if followed will reproduce the results. How do we know if information is useful? If it satisfies the desire to understand an entity and derive some knowledge from it, that information is useful. After having understood the process, if we were able to understand why the process works the way it does, we have discovered the underlying principles behind the entity and that is wisdom. Wisdom answers the question WHY!.

I shall not dwell on the questions of means of communicating knowledge and its accessibility over physically far of places. The Internet answers these beautifully. But that brings in another complication... a relevant one today..preventing information overload. Quick comes the answer... classify it, catalog it. Now in order to classify it we need to know the significant properties that characterise every piece of knowledge. What are those properties of Knowledge that can form the basis of our classification?

Like everything else around us, both tangible and intangible.. Knowledge is contextual. Meaning its partly defined by the twin axis of Space and Time. Knowledge outside is context is misleading and that defeats our purpose. Third of course is the form in which it will be accessible or in which we would comprehend it. The form of knowledge should suit the purpose of the seeker. Elementary as it seems this 3-dimensional system of ours.. its rather inadequate. If I have a document that relates to a geography and a year or quarter can I be sure it suits my purpose? Of course not. What is our purpose? Our purpose is to understand an entity. How is it that we understand this entity? By understanding how it operates.. what are the processes that comprise of the entity? In other words how does this entity function? Wunderbar! we have two more properties... Entity and its Functions. Lets see if this works...

Sounds good to me.. So far as I know these five attributes of the knowledge I seek, I should be able to access that knowledge (and no the Heizenberg's uncertainty principle does not apply here). Now what if the entity is not very general but rather specific. What if I don't want information on Mammals in general but Rats in specific! We use the basic principles of classification.. that of parent child relationship, that or hierarchy.

Next question.. is knowledge represented by a point that lies at the intersection of these co-ordinates? I would think not.. depending on the requirement, knowledge may span several sub-classes or classes themselves. The answer to that is to choose the correct measuring instrument. You will not use a meter scale to measure the distance between earth and the Sun, and similarly you will not use light-years to measure the tolerance of a nut meant for precision wrist watch. Also expanding our definition of knowledge, we can say that it is not defined by one set of values for an attribute but many.. so that it has a starting point and an ending point. Its a five dimensional figure after all.. Go figure!!

Whew!.. I need to ruminate on these ideas more.. I don't think its reached a point of knowledge let alone wisdom. Ponder on this, I shall.. (guess which movie and character). I am eager to read your comments on this.

An update:

Upon discussion with a few of my friends, a grey area was developed on whether Time and Form were dimensions that helped you understand knowledge better or where plain metadata related to the knowledge object.

As far as Time was concerned, we attempted to define the dimension.

For me Time represented the date on which the document was created. I came from the point of view that information documented at a given time in indicative enough of the understanding of that information at that point of time. It also gives us a point of reference to which we can relate events occuring at that time that might influence the understanding of the information.

My friend came from a different perspective. According to him, Time indicates the time in past, present or future to which this piece of information relates to. So if you have some information on say -the assassination of J.F.Kennedy, that information should be tagged to the point of time in history when the event occured.

I begged to disagree. If the same event was documented at different points of time, the understanding of that event might be deeper as more was understood / investigated on that event. For example, a piece of information documented during Democratic regime might portray the Iraq war in a different light than during a Republican regime. To me the time of creation of a text / documentation of a piece of knowledge / delivery of a speech / an invention / a piece of art gives a very good idea of what events and ideologies influenced the opinion expressed in that piece.

Then came Form. Now this was a particularly good one. My friend argued that the same piece of information expressed in words or in any other form should not possibly distort the information conveyed. Well not to me. If the same speech was read on paper, heard on the radio or viewed on television, we might gather different opinions of what was said. The person delivering the speech might sound very confident on the opinion expressed on paper, might sound less convinced on the radio and may actually look very insecure on television. Mediums have limitations and liberties. A graphical representation is generally much more powerful than a descriptive text. In a graphical/visual representation people tend to take home different observations and inferences (the 6 blind men phenomena).

I am open to more discussions on this, so feel free to drop in your ideas.