There are many words used for concepts transmitted and stored `stuff'
- DATA
- KNOWLEDGE
- INFORMATION
- ACTIONABLE INFORMATION
- WISDOM
In this class work we want to be very careful with these terms, since these are crucial items for Internet commerce. Using the right word makes interaction and collaboration efficient. We can't stop the world from misusing them, but we will use them as defined below. If you think your work needs definitions you can copy or adapt them, or just refer to this page.
So first some simple definitions, which may have to adapted to specific situations. They are arranged in bottom-up order, from fundamental and real to more abstract and harder to manipulate.
1. Data: Facts, objectively verifiable, of little value unless combined with other data and placed into higher level structure. Example: Gio's email is Gio @ cs.stanford.edu (even that data sentence has some structure)
2. Information: data that is previously unknown to you. It increases your store of data. It might be data that you knew once, but forgot. Information also covers relationships among data that were unknown to you. A formal definition is given in information theory [Shannon:1948]. If you didn't know my email address before it would be information. But if someone tells it to you again, it is not, it jusrt a waste of your time and of transmission capacity.
3. Actionable information: Information that causes you to change your actions or behavior. You wanted to contact me, but had only a phone number. You knew that I am hard to reach be phone. Now you can will take a different action.
4 Knowledge: Aggregated, digested, assimilated information that can drive processes. These processes will determine how to get more information, when needed, how to select the information you have to generate action, and what actions to take with the actionable information you have. During the execution of these processes you receive feedback, you learn what works, increasing your knowledge. Programs and rules in expert systems codify knowledge for automation and reuse. One can devise a knowledge-based program that will try multiple approaches to reach me. That knowledge is not obtained by simple processing of data or information, but could be learned.
5. Wisdom seems to be the meta level of knowledge that understands all the lower level concepts, and can assign relative values to processes and actions. Wisdom cannot be expressed by rules.
Computers can transmit data and information. They can be programmed to respond to actionable data if they control devices. They can also be programmed to seek actionable information, but here rules will be used to encode knowledge, often obtained from human experts. If there is feedback, computers can also be programmed to learn.
For now we leave wisdom to people.
With each of these concepts questions can be asked:
Who provides what?
Who uses what?
Who benefits from what?
The term information the most widely misused. A reason for the misuse is that the use implies that it would be actionable, but so much what is shoveled down our throats is not, or barely actionable. Learning that weather is cold today in Moscow is not actionable for most people. But making that decsion already required some knowledge. The statement would also be interpreted differently if you lived in Western Idaho - the University of Western Idaho is located in Moscow Idaho. Did you know that? Now you do. But if that information will ever be actionable is doubtful, but it is barely possible.
You see that boundaries between data, information, actionable information, and knowledge are hard to draw. It requires wisdom to use the terms properly in your setting.
Getting too much information is a waste, it consumes the reader's time. When you write, be considerate bof your readers' time!
A warning: 'The Internet is the Database' [Scott McNealy, SUN] , it is not (yet) information, and even less is actionable. If you were to act on all that is stored on the Internet, you would not survive very long.
Interaction of Data and Knowledge
Creation of Information.
- Things you never knew - search
- Stuff you have forgotten - links
- New combination of elements
Used for Decision-making
At home
In business
In government (see Meeting 3 Notes: Institutions and People) Old
Actionable information leads to making of a decision. That decision can be extrinsic to the web -- you know know how to continue the paper you are writing -- the web business gians nothing more from you. That decision can be intrinsic to the web -- you click further and eventually make a purchase or other transaction. Now the web business can gain monetary value from you.
Consolidators and Mediators
Combining information is the most powerful approach on the web. There is much information that becomes valuabe in concert with other information, and can lead to action
- The best price
- A suitable case for your laptop computer
- A convenient train to the airporta dn your flight
- A trucker that comes from the factory to your house
Such services are provider by consolidators (businesses, similar items) and mediators (software, dissimilar items). Software is needed when the tasks are harder, and specific to a customer need.
Methods to retain state information
Web linkages are stateless: each transaction is disjoint. But for e-commerce there are normally incremental interactions, as searching for some kind of service or object, finding suppliers, comparing prices and quality, and finally purchasing it. All these require some indication of state, so that the client does not have to reenter all previously found information. There are several techniques in use:
1. The server makes up a form for resubmission by the client with a click, which contains relevant state information so far gathered.
2. The server makes up a query for resubmission by the client with a click, whiche embodies the required state so far gathered.
3. The server makes up a query for resubmission by the client with a click, whiche embodies a reference to a record in the server which contains all of the state so far gathered. If the client does not respond for a long time, a garbage collector in the server removes the record.
4. The server deposits a cookie in a file of the client with relevant information. The cookie is read at a subsequent transaction. The transaction can be at long intervals. This process requires some program execution in the client for deposuting and reading cookies, initiated by the server, often using JAVA applets.
5. One of the recent proposals is used to manage state, as RDS ADO. RDS requires services in the browsers that make a table available to the server, that the server can use to deposit and extract information. RDS links to database services, so that the quantity of state information can be very large, say an entire catalog of goods.
We see that there are competing ways to keep track of state, but for Business-to-business e-commerce the more heavyweight methods are likely to be used. Note also that services that deposit information on a client machine will not provide continuity if the end-user moves among multiple client computers.
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