A Study on Basic Issues in Knowledge Management

摘要

For a long time the two basic issues have been debated in knowledge management, (1) the concept of knowledge, (2) the relationship of knowledge, information and data. Many researchers have made contributions on these issues. However, no consensus has been reached. In this paper, the two basic issues from the nature of knowledge are discussed. We suggest that knowledge is the measure of uncertainty (about what, how, when, who) of an agent about an object (or event) in a specific context, and the quantity of knowledge can be calculated with information entropy. We also study the role of information and data in knowledge management. Information makes knowledge transfer between sender and receiver, and data externalizes knowledge so that it can be stored.