User:IntelligentComputer/Metaknowledge

Metaknowledge or meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, conceptually any definition of knowledge applied to mastering, mapping or "knowing" a region of knowledge, with scope up to and including all knowledge. The term combines Meta- (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self") and Knowledge as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject; (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information; or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

Defining Metaknowledge
In epistemology, the prefix meta is used to mean about (its own category). Detailed cognitive, systemic and epistemic study and understanding of knowledge is required to distinguish methods and details for achieving knowledge about knowledge. Common uses include the development of databases that catalog knowledge or information that is bibliographic or metadata in nature. Recent work in the design of man-made intelligent systems is providing a detailed understanding of the genetic basis for knowledge and may provide a route to metaknowledge systems. Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predict that within decades, information based technologies encompass all human knowledge, thus acquiring a state of metaknowledge with a scope of all knowledge.

Application
Metaknowledge has been applied to the development of systems that attempt to classify information and fundamental knowledge. Metaknowledge may also be a future outcome of efforts to build intelligent systems.

The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a system of library classification developed by the Library of Congress. It is used by research and academic libraries. In the U.S. most public libraries and small academic libraries continue to use the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC).

Projects in the field of man-made intelligence include cyc, is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning. The project was started in 1984 by Douglas Lenat at MCC and is developed by company Cycorp.

At MIT, Minsky proposed a system of metaknowledge as a single mind spanning multiple agents. A collection of his works published in 1988 under the title [Society of Mind] describes his ideas for agency and consciousness over multiple distinct repositories of knowledge.

Universal versus contextual knowledge
One challenge facing any Metaknowledge system is the situational nature of knowledge. As Aristotle stated, "We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows." A Metaknowledge system must support both "Universal" or "ultimate" truths defined by Plato and Buddhist systems and situational or contextual truths described in Aristotle's Metaphysics. One solution described by Jones and Rubalsky superimposes a Platonic Form of information over context, allowing a pure state of knowledge to be preserved while allowing knowledge to also be contextually correct.

Related Concepts
For the reason of different definitions of knowledge in the subject matter literature, meta-information is or is not included in meta-knowledge. Detailed cognitive, systemic and epistemic study of human knowledge requires a distinguishing of these concepts. but in the common language knowledge includes information, and, for example, bibliographic data are considered as a meta-knowledge.

Metaknowledge is a fundamental conceptual instrument in such research and scientific domains as, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, and others dealing with study and operations on knowledge, seen as a unified object/entities, abstracted from local conceptualizations and terminologies.

Examples of the first-level individual metaknowledge are methods of planning, modeling, tagging, learning and every modification of a domain knowledge. The procedures, methodologies and strategies of teaching, coordination of e-learning courses are individual meta-meta-knowledge of an intelligent entity (a person, organization or society).

Universal meta-knowledge frameworks have to be valid for the organization of meta-levels of individual meta-knowledge. Put simpler, metaknowledge may be linked to knowledge you need but you don't yet possess: it is a cluster of definitions and methods aiming to guide you in gathering the pertinent knowledge with regard to your activity.

Notes and references

 * http://logic.stanford.edu/kif/metaknowledge.html
 * http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=1629&d=23&h=5&f=3