This is an email I sent today to some of my colleagues. It is here out of context but could be of interest nevertheless.

Greetings from Bangalore airport, which is a quite uncomfortable place as there are no airline lounges and the crowds are filling up a small waiting area. Unfortunately all outbound flights from here to the "West" depart after 1 am......

This morning in a much more pleasant atmosphere sitting still in front of the Arabian see and listening to the waves I thought somewhat more about the relationship between Knowledge and Information Management.
I am still convinced that Prabhakar is rigth: as soon as knowledge of a person is made explicit, it becomes information. Knowledge travels from one brain to the other as information. This means "traditional" information management is genuinely knowledge management. In this view a piece of information which did come out of the brain of a colleague on Monday is completely indifferent from an article that was written and published 10 years ago. They both need to be indexed, found, categorized and whatever you want.
What we discuss today as knowledge management is often a very restricted part of this. If we talk about knowledge sharing between peers and similar, so is this more Human Resource Management in a strict sense, how to bring people to share knowledge, as we know from own experience they do not share information just too often. But by no means let us get into a defensive position when we do "traditional" information management, there is no knowledge management without that!
But I am not so sure that Prabhakar is right in his thesis that knowledge exists only in the head of a human beeing; people who are working on artificial intelligence are trying to prove the contrary for some time now.
I attach you a little picture, I put together this morning. It repeats the known hierarchy of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom and puts some chracterization to every level.
- Data becomes Information by structuring and ordering
- Information becomes knowledge through the possibility of conclusions and inferences
- Wisdom is the possibility to give judgements.
Some of you will remember Sir Tim's hierarchy presentation of the Semantic Web. You will see the striking parrallelity between my drawing and Berners Lees presentation of the semantic web. So this means: A computer systems which is able to infere, this means to create new information from existing information is or with other words "to conclude something" is a knowledgeable system.
So, the knowledge level in my picture corresponds precisely to the Ontology level in Tim Berner Lee's picture. Computer can be knowledge systems ONLY through Ontologies.
Cheers and see you soon.
Johannes