Metaknowledge Explained

Metaknowledge or meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge.^[1]

Some authors divide meta-knowledge into orders:

• zero order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is not knowledge (and hence zero order meta-knowledge is not meta-knowledge per se)
• first order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is zero order meta-knowledge
• second order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is first order meta-knowledge
• most generally,

n + 1 order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is n order meta-knowledge.^[2] Other authors call zero order meta-knowledge first order knowledge, and call first order meta-knowledge second order knowledge; meta-knowledge is also known as higher order knowledge.^[3]

Meta-knowledge is a fundamental conceptual instrument in such research and scientific domains as, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, and others dealing with study and operations on knowledge, seen as a unified object/entities, abstracted from local conceptualizations and terminologies.Examples of the first-level individual meta-knowledge are methods of planning, modeling, tagging, learning and every modification of a domain knowledge. Indeed, universal meta-knowledge frameworks have to be valid for the organization of meta-levels of individual meta-knowledge.

Meta-Knowledge may be automatically harvested from electronic publication archives, to reveal patterns in research, relationships between researchers and institutions and to identify contradictory results.

See also

• Epistemic logic
• Macropædia
• Metacognition
• Metalearning
• Metaprogramming (in computer science)
• Metahistory (concept)
• Metahistory, a book by Hayden White
• Meta-philosophy
• Meta-epistemology
• Metalogic
• Metamathematics
• Metaphysics
• Meta-ethics
• Meta-ontology
• Metatheory
• Metadata

External links

• Knowledge Interchange Format Reference Manual Chapter 7: Metaknowledge, Stanford University
• A Survey of Cognitive and Agent Architectures: Meta-knowledge, University of Michigan

Notes and References

1. Evans. J. A.. Foster. J. G.. 2011-02-11. Metaknowledge. Science. en. 331. 6018. 721–725. 10.1126/science.1201765. 2011Sci...331..721E . 220090552 . 0036-8075.
2. Book: Mark Burgin. Theory Of Knowledge: Structures And Processes. 27 October 2016. World Scientific. 978-981-4522-69-4. 165.
3. Pedersen, Nikolaj Jl Linding, and Christoph Kelp. "Second-Order Knowledge." The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge, 2010. 586-596.