TABLE OF CONTENTS It was Albert Einstein who cautioned our world that "Information is not knowledge". Einstein also asserted that "Knowledge is experience. Everything else is information". This was some time before the Information theory, MIS, IT and KM, before many world cultures started treating knowledge as information. As "Knowledge Management (KM)" got carelessly reduced to information and data manipulation and processing and the oxymoron of "explicit knowledge" started making broad rounds, Einstein's wisdom (but not knowledge) became all but forgotten.
In the rapidly unfolding "Post 9/11" times of the 21st century, it has again become clearly insufficient to rely on our vast depositories of data and information. It has become quite unsatisfactory to rely on our information technologies. In this new world of new action we need to focus on continually produced, improved and shared knowledge and on new Knowledge Technology (KT) designed to support and expand the processes of knowledge formation, enhancement and transfer.
To serve the new realities well, it has become doubly important to define and establish essential differences between information and knowledge, information and data and also knowledge and wisdom. Simply dividing knowledge into tacit and explicit, without defining "knowledge" itself and without distinguishing it from information and data, is a curious phenomenon. It is bound to bring forth even more disasters, stemming from insufficient, incomplete decisions and less than coherent judgments.
In this paper, we argue that while information is a symbolic...
