Knowledge and Information

First of all, what the hell is Knowledge? Why it is something we know, of course! But seriously.. it depends on who you talk to.

• The lawyer will say it's an understanding of a thing
• The economist will say it's information about a thing
• The philosopher will say they don't know

At least Plato had a catchy definition for us: a "justified true belief". However, it is well understood nowadays that this one-liner doesn't suffice. Some smug epistemologist may tell you it's a "cluster concept", or that it is simply an artifact of natural language, referring only to a degree of conviction. Both excellent ways of dodging the question.

In pursuit of practicality let's ignore the philosopher and focus on the remaining definitions..

• an understanding of a thing
• information about a thing

Nice, and now - a magic trick:

• an understanding of a thing we have information about

Information is cultivated to develop Knowledge. This knowledge can be used to develop even more Knowledge, or revise existing Knowledge.

This is our lazy compromise between the two - composed of an output (an understanding) and an input (information). We'll refer to this definition when talking about Knowledge Management, which is simply a process of turning our input into an output and looping over that output.