Nothing means anything, or "What's knowledge all about?"

Knowledge technologies is a different kind of Computer Science subject. In my experience, many students come to this subject with a technical background, where a subject might typically have goal structures like:

1. learn some definitions
2. learn some algorithms
3. apply the algorithms for solving certain kinds of problems

Certainly, we will be doing these things in Knowledge Technologies. But if these three things are your only take-away from this subject, then we've failed. (And you might fail!)


What is important here are the applications, in particular for contribution to human understanding. The operative word here is "human".
For example, we'll discuss some techniques for manipulating data, making certain kinds of inferences from that data, and evaluating the effectiveness of the system. However, statements like "the 1-nearest neighbour model, using the Manhattan distance metric, scores 84% accuracy when classifying document categories on the given data set" are all well and good, but lack knowledge. (We'll define most of these terms in this example and discuss inferencing from data as the subject goes along.)

But what then is knowledge? In short, there is no complete agreed-upon definition (a common and frustrating phenomenon that we're going to see a lot of in this subject). We'll be spending much of the first week grappling with the notion of what knowledge is, and what we want to accomplish with knowledge technologies. As a first blush attempt, let me quote the head of the relevant article on Wikipedia:

"Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning."

This isn't the definition that we're going to use in this subject, but hopefully you'll peruse it and keep it in mind as we contextualise the way that we're using the terms in this subject. You might wish to consider the example above, and ask yourself why I think that it fails to convey knowledge, and whether you agree.

As a final observation, many students find it challenging to work in an application-focussed or user-focussed environment, rather than with a process-focus, like many technical subjects. On the other hand, the skills that we develop here tend to be very useful out in the real world, where people actually want to learn things and solve problems - and also, it can be a little more fun than just bland number-crunching!

References

Knowledge. (2014, July 16). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:08, July 25, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowledge&oldid=617162097