Friday, February 13, 2009

Knowledge is connection

Listened to a very interesting Big Ideas podcast today from David Weinberger on Knowledge at the end of the Information Age. Some very salient points about the complexity of data and the transformation of data to knowledge. One point that really stuck with me was that metadata is merely our interperetation of data, and that our metadata could easily be someone else's data. Adding context and meaning to data is initself data to be analyzed and searched upon.

Another point that I'd been spruking for a while is that knowledge is not as important as understanding. David places this even deeper stating that what we used to perceive of as knowledge is in fact the organisation of the data in a meaningful way, not just the acquisition of data, so the term 'gaining knowledge' still applies to the google generation, just the emphasis changes.