What Is This Thing Called Knowledge

We see knowledge as an active dynamic undirected and extensible structure. It exists in people's heads, and we think we have at least a passable imitation in Active Structure.

There are many things that are crystallisations of knowledge - algorithms, books. We are saying that knowledge lies on the side of an active cognitive transformation - only if the structure is active and extensible is it knowledge. There is knowledge in a book, in the sense that a person can read the book and acquire knowledge, but without the person there is no knowledge. If we can resurrect the tree falling in the forest, without the person to act as a transformer of what they read into active knowledge, the book has no knowledge. And think how much prior knowledge is required - the knowledge to know how to read in the appropriate language, the technical knowledge to grasp the concepts the writer uses as a foundation.

See Natural Language Processing for a worked example in transforming text into knowledge.

Knowledge Management