Knowledge Networks

This is a knowledge society. After going through its hunting/gathering, agricultural, and industrial stages, the primary production factor of humanity is now knowledge. Without it, society would come to a grinding halt. However, what is knowledge? It is not a material resource that can be easily quantified. There are many definitions of this all-important, yet elusive, concept. A common interpretation is that it concerns a theoretical and practical understanding of a subject embodied in expertise and skills that help its owner to resolve concrete problems. Creating, processing, and applying knowledge often is a collective process, requiring much communication, coordination, and collaboration between many stakeholders. Knowledge networks are essential to support this distributed, complicated, knowledge-management process. Such a network is [Page 470]typically a complex, evolving, sociotechnical system of enabling communications infrastructure, a network of knowledge resources and services, and a social network of collaborators.

Society is awash in data, with which knowledge is often confused. With computing power doubling roughly every two years (known as Moore's Law) and computers and people getting ever more connected through the Internet and mobile technologies, there is an explosion of possibilities to store, transform, link, and share data. However, data alone are meaningless, as they are nothing more than a representation of individual facts, descriptions of particular states of the world. To be meaningful, data need to be turned into information by connecting selections of data to a particular context of use, such as decision making. With information, questions like who, what, where, and when can be answered. Although meaningful and potentially of use, information is not necessarily useful in practice. Knowledge provides a framework for efficiently evaluating and selecting relevant information for resolving concrete problems. Knowledge is distilled from information by a process of learning about a domain, which can often take a great deal of time.

To illustrate the differences between these terms, presume that a political organization wants to know which persons best to approach to help out in an election campaign. It has a large database of facts about which users viewed what pages of their Website at what date and time. A software program selects from these data those persons who live closest to the campaign headquarters and who have accessed the site within the past month. Still, the output contains hundreds of potential candidates, too many to approach personally. A seasoned campaigner, therefore, looks at the Web pages these people accessed, the area where they live, the organizations they work for, their browsing histories, and so on, and makes a shortlist of candidates based on personal extensive campaigning experience. This knowledge could not have been provided by the Internet alone.

Knowledge is usually not embodied in an individual who accesses only a single knowledge resource. Instead, it is often distributed over many knowledge resources and people, together forming a knowledge network. As a network is an interconnected system of things or people, a knowledge network can be defined as the combined system of (1) an enabling communication infrastructure; (2) meaningfully linked data and information resources (which together are called knowledge resources), as well as the services that make these resources accessible; and (3) the social network of people who have, create, process, and apply knowledge to their professional activities.

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