Meta Knowledge

Meta Knowledge is the knowledge about what we know. That means, meta knowledge is knowledge about knowledge. For example, bibliography is a source of meta knowledge. Meta knowledge is also written as meta-knowledge or metaknowledge.

Meta Knowledge is a very fundamental elements in artificial intelligence, research sectors and scientific sectors. Knowledge management and knowledge engineering is being a popular point of study as the field of knowledge and meta knowledge is expending.

There are 2 common types of meta knowledge. They are:

• Universal Meta Knowledge: Universal meta knowledge means the knowledge which can be valid for each of the individual knowledges.
• Individual Meta Knowledge: Individual meta knowledge means the knowledge of a specific domain or organization or facts.

Universal meta knowledge must be valid for any kinds of meta-levels of individual meta-knowledge.

Order of Meta Knowledge

There are 3 orders of meta knowledge. They are:

• Zero Order Meta Knowledge: The knowledge about non-knowledge domain is called zero order meta knowledge. So, zero order meta knowledge is sometime don’t considered as meta knowledge.
• First Order Meta Knowledge: The knowledge about zero order meta knowledge is called first order meta knowledge.
• Second Order Meta Knowledge: The knowledge about first order meta knowledge is called second order meta knowledge.

Generally, n+1’th order meta knowledge is the knowledge about n’th order meta knowledge except for zero order meta knowledge.

Planning, modeling, tagging, learning of a domain knowledge can be considered as examples of the zero order individual meta knowledge.

Sometimes the order of meta knowledge is started from first order. Moreover meta knowledge is also identified as higher order knowledge.