We are in the information age, aren't we ? Well, we collect information, put it in big data bases, or distribute it accross the web. But in fact, we collect no information, but plain data, numbers, texts, images videos etc. All our computer based technology is designed for measurement and collection, this is their strong part. But I want to access information, and - in the best case - only that one which belongs to my problem.
So, the question is, how can we transform collected data to useful information ? Many philosophers had discussed and investigated, what knowledge, insight and information is. I love this point of view:
The humans are able to act in a free manner, but actions are conditioned by situations. In the course of the lifetime, a human experiences many situations (described by the data provided from the senses), and the actions performed in that situations induce new situations. Therefore, one thing is clear: data must be associated with situations, otherwise, they are meaningless, without any value for the existence of humans.
Another thing emerges from the necessarity of decisions: we all know, life faces us with problems, which force us to decide to go the one way or the other, to choose between options. The decision is the predecessor of the action, and the problem is the predecessor of the decision. Because we remember the association between situation, action (as consequence of a decision as a consequence of a problem) and the result, we can decide better in future, in more or less similar situations.
But background knowledge or experience for itself is not sufficient to decide well. A goal is needed, or let's say more generally, an intention. The experience (the situation-action-result tuples) tells us which action in the given situation may have the biggest chance to lead to success in respect to what we want (the goal, the intention).
Summary: facts (data) - situation (context) - problems(questions) - goals(intention) are the things which distinguish data from information: in combination, they help to determine the best action to take. For short, this is knowledge, in some sense it is the equation of facts - situation - problems - goals - actions solved for actions.
And from here on, I can tell what my requirements to a Knowledge Management Tools are (some things I can not explain more detail here):
- allow to collect any kind of facts, any type of data
- allow to collect context descriptions
- allow to collect problems
- allow to collect intentions
- connect all these elements, by n:m relations
- allow to weight (again) these connections at any time
- allow to add or discard any connections at any time
Unfortunately, we have no advanced Artificial Intelligence today which would allow to code and access any kind of gray and color of the color set of life. We have to categorize and quantize what we experience every day. And we have technological limits. In respect to this, I would add this requirements:
- visualise the connections
- allow to classify context, problems and intentions
- find connections automatically by statistical analysis of words or other means
- allow to create context, problems and intentions recursively out of other contexts, problems, intentions, data.
The last requirement is inspired by the observation, that life is a steady flow:
- allow to create contexts out of sequences of conditions or event descriptions.
Can't wait to play with a system which provides this features. So I hope, someone will implement this *few* requirements soon :-)
