Metaknowledge

Metaknowledge or meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge.<ref name=":0">Evans, J. A.; Foster, J. G. (2011-02-11). "Metaknowledge". Science. 331 (6018): 721–725. doi:10.1126/science.1201765. ISSN 0036-8075.</ref>

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, <math>n + 1</math> order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is <math>n</math> order meta-knowledge.<ref name="Burgin2016">Mark Burgin (27 October 2016). Theory Of Knowledge: Structures And Processes. World Scientific. p. 165. ISBN 978-981-4522-69-4.</ref>

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.<ref>Pedersen, Nikolaj Jl Linding, and Christoph Kelp. "Second-Order Knowledge." The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge, 2010. 586-596.</ref>

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.<ref name=":0" />

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