Definition [E]

While knowledge is primarily derived from experiencing reality, it can also be shared or derived through communication, through artifacts like speech, text, graphics. In this case, the structure of some reality is observed, analyzed, evaluated, and projected to these artifacts, by some entity. Then, other entities analyze the artifacts to try to infer the projected knowledge.

This knowledge model projection process is a key modeling activity where some model, considered from some viewpoint is projected through some perspective, onto some artifacts.

The knowledge modeling, projection, and inference process, a fascinating process, better considered in another space-time, constitutes the heart, foundation, and essence of communication, the most sophisticated process available.

Because of this sophistication, communication, as well as its many potential points of failure, may also be better addressed in another space-time. Only some aspects related to knowledge sharing are briefly considered here.

One key characteristic is that in fact, communication does not directly carry knowledge, rather it is a tool used to map some emitter knowledge model to information sets so that receivers may infer their own model of the shared knowledge, from these information set artifacts.

Since knowledge remains and evolves within each communicating entity, each entity's knowledge background and knowledge processing ability are key to the process.

The communicating parties' respective knowledge backgrounds not only constitute source and destination for the communication, they also provide interpretation filters.

Assuming some of the receiver knowledge, from its own knowledge background, the emitter articulates and projects a logical track or information set sequence in the hope of leading receivers into inferring corresponding new knowledge from their own respective knowledge background.

As receivers experience and analyze artifact structure, each evolves its own knowledge (background). Because of this, the knowledge-background similarity between communicating parties is crucial to effective knowledge sharing.

Communicating parties' knowledge backgrounds are always different yet always share some similarity. Along with the many other potential points of failure of communication, the level of relative knowledge-background similarity is determining. The closer knowledge backgrounds are, the more effective the communication and knowledge sharing can be.

When two people have very similar knowledge backgrounds, very few words may be required and those most useful may be rather vague words like “thing”, “do”, or "push" as in “now push the thing down” which could be very specific in the given context. Similarly, if the backgrounds are very different, even very specific terms can be interpreted very differently.