6. Concluding Remarks
Without apply digitized knowledge, problems cannot be solved in Industry 4.0. Thus, any ambiguity in the definition of knowledge creates unnecessary complexity and hinders the advancement of Industry 4.0.
Most authors attempting to define knowledge have restricted themselves to their respective disciplines and provided piecemeal solutions. Some of the definitions suffer circularity. Thus, eliminating circularity in the definition of knowledge as well as maintaining a genial attitude toward all definitions reported to date constitutes a major challenge when attempting to define knowledge. This article overcomes this challenge by proposing a three-element-based definition of knowledge; i.e., a piece of knowledge consists of knowledge claim, knowledge provenance, and knowledge inference. These elements have been defined in clear terms to help make a distinction between knowledge and data/information. Knowledge inference helps define knowledge types—definitional, deductive, inductive, or creative—whereas knowledge claim manifests knowledge in explicit terms. Each type of knowledge exhibits some categories, which have been exemplified using real-life scenarios relevant to engineering design and manufacturing. It has been observed that except definitional knowledge, no other knowledge type or their categories can exist independently. They, however, form concept maps, which are networks of concepts or user-defined ontologies. In other words, when a concept map is studied, its contents boil down to definitional, deductive, inductive, and/or creative knowledge. Consequently, when constructing concept maps for human or machine learning, contents can be organized and analyzed based on the type of knowledge and its categories. This way, the types of categories of knowledge can be used as semantic annotations.
Nevertheless, defining knowledge implies proposing pieces of analytic a priori-based creative knowledge. Thus, the process of defining knowledge requires further development. In this sense, the proposed study marks the beginning of a long journey that would end when the definition of knowledge would itself become an analytic a priori knowledge for all stakeholders.
Acknowledgments: The author has no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.
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