Inaccuracy, ambiguity and irrelevance: an analysis of the nature of quality in knowledge management using the noetic prism

Quality, as it applies to knowledge systems, is not singular in nature but emergent from aspects of the system which themselves are subject to variation in quality. We suggest that there are three quality determinants, which we can characterise as inaccuracy, ambiguity, and irrelevance. We use the framework of the noetic prism to describe inaccuracy, ambiguity, and irrelevance formally as a result of variance in the dimensions of granularity, shape and scope in noetic material, and suggest that any unreliable system will always contain an amalgam of the three. We suggest some practical implications based on this analysis.

[1]  Peter Gärdenfors,et al.  Conceptual spaces - the geometry of thought , 2000 .

[2]  Dean O. McFarren.  Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World's Top Corporations , 2000 .

[3]  Kevin T. Kelly.  The Learning Power of Belief Revision , 1998, TARK.

[4]  Ilkka Tuomi,et al.  Data is more than knowledge: implications of the reversed knowledge hierarchy for knowledge management and organizational memory , 1999, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. 1999. HICSS-32. Abstracts and CD-ROM of Full Papers.

[5]  Gregor Kiczales,et al.  Beyond the Black Box: Open Implementation , 1996, IEEE Softw..

[6]  Daniel G. Bobrow,et al.  KRL: Another Perspective , 1979, Cogn. Sci..

[7]  A. Tversky,et al.  Advances in prospect theory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty , 1992 .

[8]  Thomas H. Davenport,et al.  Book review:Working knowledge: How organizations manage what they know. Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. $29.95US. ISBN 0‐87584‐655‐6 , 1998 .

[9]  J. Pearl.  Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference , 2000 .

[10]  E. Lorenz.  Dimension of weather and climate attractors , 1991, Nature.

[11]  P. Spirtes,et al.  Causation, prediction, and search , 1993 .

[12]  Shih-Fu Chang,et al.  Overview of the MPEG-7 standard , 2001, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol..

[13]  John F. Sowa,et al.  Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics , 2000, ICCS.

[14]  Karl-Erik Sveiby.  The New Organizational Wealth: Managing and Measuring Knowledge-Based Assets , 1997 .

[15]  M. J. Earl,et al.  Knowledge as strategy: reflections on Skandia International and Shorko Films , 1994 .

[16]  John G. Gammack,et al.  An Approach to Managing Repurposing of Digitised Knowledge Assets , 2001, Australas. J. Inf. Syst..

[17]  John G. Gammack,et al.  The noetic prism as a theoretical framework for contextualisation , 2002 .