Data, Information, and Knowledge

An Engineering Perspective

Jim Farmerinstructional media + magic, inc.

As presented at the

Knowledge Networks WorkshopManchester Community College

Sunday, November 4th 2001

Manchester, Connecticut

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Some definitions

• Data

1. Known facts or things used as a basis for inference or reckoning

2. Quantities of characters operated on by a computer, etc.

• Information

• something told, knowledge

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Eighth Edition, 1990, Oxford

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Some definitions

• Knowledge

• 1. Awareness or familiarity gained by experience (of a person, fact, or thing)

• 2. A theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, language, etc.; the sum of what is known

• 3. (Philosophy) True, justified belief; certain understanding, as opposed to opinion

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Eighth Edition, 1990, Oxford

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Dimensions of knowledge

• Relevance

• Reliability and validity

• Timeliness

Value is derived from the use of information in decision-making.

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Knowledge management perspective

Data

Information

Knowledge

Metadata

Relevance, value

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Information theory

Information reduces uncertainty [in the validity of a set of messages where noise induces error]

C.E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”The Bell System Technical Journal, July-October 1948

Therefore information has economic value [based on relevance, timeliness, and validity].

Harry Markowitz, “Portfolio Selection,” The RAND Corporation, 1952

If information has value, then there is “intellectual property.”

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More definitions

• Relevant - bearing on or having reference to the matter at hand

• Timely - opportune, coming at the right time

• Valid

• 1. (of a reason, objection, etc). Sound or defensible; well-grounded

• 2. executed with the proper formalities 3 legally acceptable, not having reached its expiry date.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Eighth Edition, 1990, Oxford

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Experts and knowledge

• Expert - having special knowledge or skill in a subject

• Expertise - expert skill, knowledge, or judgement

• Judgment

1. The critical faculty; discernment

2. Good sense

3. An opinion or estimate

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Eighth Edition, 1990, Oxford

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Proxies for validity

• The publisher’s “brand”

• The author’s affiliation and reputation

• Historical experience of the using community

• Reviews and reviewers

• Future citations

• Expectations of the using community

The expected is more believable

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Perspectives on the Revolution

• Factors driving the [Internet] revolution

The Internet eliminates time based and information based inefficiencies in all forms of commerce, government, and interpersonal activity

D. C. Bohnett, “The Internet and Its Impact” at the Marschak Colloquium,

University of California, Los Angeles, March 17, 2000

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The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

For the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning.

Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” Scientific American, May, 2001

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An ontology

• [For] artificial-intelligence and Web researchers an ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relations among terms. The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules.

• The taxonomy defines classes of objects and relations among them. For example, an address may be defined as a type of location, and city codes may be defined to apply only to locations, and so on.

Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” Scientific American, May, 2001

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Then and now

Then"Coffee Houses"

Now"The Internet"

Using community Local Global

Method of communication

Personal Electronic

Validity Trusted Suspect

Timeliness Days orweeks

Seconds or minutes

Domain masterycompared to existing knowledge

Broad Narrow

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Meta-data defined

• In data processing, meta-data is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment.

• Meta-data may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data.

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, November 2, 2001

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The Dublin Core

ContentIntellectual

Property Instantiation

Title Creator Date

Subject Publisher Format

Description Contributor Identifier

Type Rights Language

Source

Relation

Coverage

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Meta-data: Military intelligence

• Personnel

• Person’s affiliation

• Organization (military unit)

• Place Name

• Geographical area (latitude and longitude)

• Date and time

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Early “tagging”

• Colonel Redl <person=Redl, Thomas A> led his division <unit=Austrian 104th Division> into the Vienna sector <place=Vienna> <latlong=48o 15” N 16o 22” E> last week <date=19191012> for a training exercise <reliability=B%>.

circa 1958 from a proposed General Electric information storage and retrieval system for the intelligence community

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the·sau·rus (th-sôrs)

1. A book of synonyms, often including related and contrasting words and antonyms.

2. A book of selected words or concepts, such as a specialized vocabulary of a particular field, as of medicine or music.

First definition, www.dictionary.com, November 3, 2001

“The ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) database … currently includes more than 1 million abstracts of education-related documents and journal articles.” All are indexed using the “Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors,” now in the the 14th edition.

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Hyperlinks and hypertext

“Hypertext" is non-sequentially linked pieces of text or other information. If the focus of such a system or document is on non-textual types of information, the term hypermedia is often used instead. In traditional printed documents, practically the only such link supported is the footnote, so hypertext is often referred to as "the generalized footnote."

Jakob Nielsen, Hypertext'87 Trip Report,

ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 19, 4 April 1988 See also Jakob Nielsen, “Hypertext and Hypermedia,” 1900

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Types of tools

• Collaboration

• Information retrieval

• Authoring and versioning

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Finding information

• Search tools

• Table of contents, indices

• Full text, unweighted and weighted

• Keywords

• Meta-data tags and values

• Patterns (“document like this one”)

• Topic maps (an XML application)

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Supplemented full-text search

Publications... de vue de J. Marschak et P. Samuelson", Revue ...

Marengo, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, vol. 7, n ... aversion and the value of information", The Journal of ... cournot.u-strasbg.fr/willinger/publications.htm - 27k - Cached - Similar pages

Untitled... was to economic behavior and launched Marschak

on a series of studies regarding the economics of information. The value, or demand price, of information in any ... www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/National_Academy_Press_Books/ biographical_memoirs/bio134.htm - 34k - Cached - Similar pages

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Topic maps

• In general, the structural information conveyed by topic maps includes:

groupings of addressable information objects around topics (occurrences), and

relationships between topics (associations).

• A topic map defines a multidimensional topic space —in which the distances between topics are measurable in terms of the number of intervening topics.

International Standards Organization, ISO 13250, 1999

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Sample topic map<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="yes" ?

> <topicmap topic="xmltools">

<topic id="xmltools"> <topname> <basename>Free XML tools and software

</basename> </topname> <occurs type="TMOR_IndexDescr"

href="http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/" /> </topic><topic id="V_JDiamond" types="TMTT_Vendor">

<topname> <basename>Jason Diamond</basename> <sortname>jason diamond</sortname> </topname> </topic>

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Collaboration

• Chat

• Electronic mail “e-mail”

• Threaded discussions “listservs”

• Conferencing

• Common library

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A “Team”

“… a group of people, each of whom takes decisions about something different but who receive a common reward as the joint result of all of those decisions.”

“But to keep each member of the team in precise knowledge about everything that is relevant to the team as a whole, the team would incur heavy costs of information.

Jacob Marschak, “Elements for a Theory of Teams,” Management Science, January 1955

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Tools

Then Now

Keywords Index Index, keywords

Topics Table of Contents Topic MapsThesaurus2

Text search Concordance Full-text,Keywords

Synonyms Thesaurus1 Thesaurus1

Associations Parameterizedtext search

Style Descriptionsof style

Patterns

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Role of XML

XML Role XML Component

Specification XML Schema, DTD

Content Data XML Meta-data XML Hyperlinks XLink, Xpath

Presentation XSL, XSLT

Organizationof Subject Matter

XTM

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W3C Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.

Resource Description Framework (RDF), www.w3.org/RDF November 4, 2001

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Multimedia

• More precisely represents the author’s view

• Higher information density

• More difficult to describe, store, and retrieve

• More dependent upon devices that have a short economic life

• More likely to have restrictions on use (because of the cost of production)

The end

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