Monday, March 06, 2006

Living Knowledge

I have been thinking about an idea related to the debated topic of the difference between information and knowledge.

Some have said that Knowledge can exist in an Explicit (tangible - Eg: documents) format and a Tacit (intangible - Eg: thought) format. I even believe the camp who also talks about Implicit Knowledge, knowledge that is tacit but has the potential to be transferred successfully to explicit.

Some say that once knowledge is recorded explicitly then it becomes information. Some say the management of information is only the vehicle, the contents could be then data, knowledge and/or information. As the original definition implies, information is data 'in formation' (giving structure).

I like to think of knowledge as having two states. Static and Dynamic. Static knowledge is the knowledge that has been recorded. It is in stasis until 'digested'. Then it becomes dynamic. It can be flavoured by the recipients own knowledge and experiences and then perhaps they create further static knowledge or transfer the dynamic knowledge through socialisation.