Knowledge vs Information
What’s the difference between knowledge and information? If you want to go by dictionaries, the difference is subtle. Information is what you can acquire by observation, reading, or hearsay, with no guarantee of their validity. On the other hand, knowledge is what you can acquire by study, observation, or experience, and any ideas inferred from that. That’s what the dictionary will say, which only really implies the idea that knowledge is more driven by empiricism, and so you might infer it is more likely to be valid.
I say this because I go by a particular model that is mostly aligned with and builds on these subtle semantic differences, which I am going to share here. This model goes beyond knowledge and information, but I’d like to keep this focused.
First of all, I would like to assert that knowledge is not something that can directly be shared or transmitted. Unlike information, knowledge only exists in your mind through the process of some sort of relative validation, whether it’s experience or logical reasoning.
Information exists in your mind as well, but can be externalized via language and communication. Information will always be more abstract and general than knowledge because of the bandwidth limitations and context sensitivity of natural language. Examples of information are obvious: this blog posts, words in a book, something your teacher said, gossip in the workplace, etc. They are descriptions of some existing knowledge.
This suggests that the closest thing to sharing knowledge is to encode it as information you can share via communication. This will almost always be a lossy encoding. What’s more, it doesn’t assure the knowledge created on the other end will be the same. Say you have some knowledge. You want to share it with a friend. You’re standing next to her, so you tell her about it. This process is encoding the knowledge you want to share as information, which you can then share via speech. Your friend listens to it and then what? They have that information! But do they have the knowledge?
Polanyi will tell you what they have is explicit knowledge. I don’t really like this name because I don’t think it’s very accurate to my model of what knowledge really is. My model is more like Polanyi’s tacit knowledge. To me, explicit knowledge is information in one’s mind, but I’m okay with calling it knowledge, as long as you’re explicit about it’s… explicitness. I’m less okay with calling anything external to the mind “knowledge” because it’s really not. It’s information.
This is why I scoff at “knowledge bases” because they aren’t really about knowledge… unless it’s a semantic knowledge base that a computer can reason with. In that case, the knowledge is really that of the computer!
So to summarize, information is a description of knowledge with relatively low fidelity. Information can be shared via communication in various mediums, usually natural language. Knowledge is something that is created and exists only in the mind. You can have explicit knowledge (which is just information in your mind), or tacit knowledge (knowledge you might not be able to describe), but the key to knowledge is that it is about process or how things are. It cannot be transmitted ever, but the closest you can get is to encode it as information, share that, and hope you encoded it in a way that will unpack similarly on the other end.
There’s a lot more to this point, involving concepts such as data, understanding, and wisdom. This model is known as DIKW, which finally has an article on Wikipedia. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s the best article on it, for example, it should be DIKUW to include the understanding layer. Oh well. I’ve been calling it WUKI and Data. Data is separate because it’s arguably not necessary, but then also I get to make two sci-fi references when explaining it.