Defining Knowledge Constituents and Contents

Abstract

While it appears that a consensus is crystalising with regard to the hierarchy of concepts such as “knowledge”, “definition” and “information”, there is an increasing urgency for improving definitions of these terms. Strategies such as “knowledge extraction” or “data mining” rely on the increasing availability of digital (electronic) records addressing almost any aspect of socio-economic realm. Information processors are invaluable in the capacity of turning large amount of data into information. However, a new problem emerged on the surface in this new information environment: numerous concepts and terms are blurred by ambiguous definitions (including the concept of ‘definition’ itself). This triggered a need for mitigating hindrances such as homonymy and synonymy, leading further to demands on the decoding software complexity of which equals the artificial intelligence applications. Information technology presumably copes with this diversity by providing the information decoding ‘tools’. This opens a never-ending opportunity for further permutations of tasks and service abilities. The solution, however, is to address the causes rather than indulge in multiplying the superficial remedies. Clearly, the multiplicity of definitions for the same concepts, false synonyms and so forth show that there is a need for introducing definitions of sufficient dimensionality. In this article, a number of examples of important concepts are presented first to point at the ambiguities associated with them, and then to propose their disambiguation. The minimum intent is to demonstrate how these key terms can be defined to avoid ambiguities such as pleonasm, homonymy, synonymy and circularity. KEywoRDS Ambiguity, Concept, Knowledge