Daily Knowledge Valuation in Organizations

1Daily Knowledge

From the beginning, knowledge has been a preoccupation for humans. A lot of questions are still being discussed: What is knowledge? How is knowledge built? How is it represented in the mind? How can it be kept? How can it be learned? etc.

In this book, we deal with the notion of daily knowledge. We try to answer questions that have been discussed before. However, first of all, let us present the notion of knowledge as it is discussed in the knowledge engineering community. We also talk about individual versus collective knowledge to conclude by showing how we consider daily knowledge and challenges to deal with in order to manage daily knowledge.

1.1. Knowledge

The notion of knowledge has been defined since Antiquity. Plato, for instance, defined thought as the intellectual model of objects. Heraclite went toward the definition of the logos as a triangle which distinguished thought, from expression, from reality. Saussure in his course [SAU 83] defined the base of the semiotic: a representation of knowledge embedded in an activity is related to a specific symbol. Currently, these representations are increasingly used to enhance learning from expertise and past experience. So, a human has to recognize concepts in the reference to make sense.

A sense is the combination of a signifier (the form which the sign takes) and a signified (the concept it represents). Within this theory, humans identify a sign from both the signifier and the signified. The semiotic triangle ...