metaknowledge

{{Short description|Knowledge about knowledge}}

Metaknowledge or meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge.{{Cite journal|last1=Evans|first1=J. A.|last2=Foster|first2=J. G.|date=2011-02-11|title=Metaknowledge|url=https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201765|journal=Science|language=en|volume=331|issue=6018|pages=721–725|doi=10.1126/science.1201765|bibcode=2011Sci...331..721E |s2cid=220090552 |issn=0036-8075}}

Some authors divide meta-knowledge into orders:

• zero order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is not knowledge (and hence zero order meta-knowledge is not meta-knowledge per se)
• first order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is zero order meta-knowledge
• second order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is first order meta-knowledge
• most generally, $n\; +\; 1$ order meta-knowledge is knowledge whose domain is $n$ order meta-knowledge.{{cite book|author=Mark Burgin|title=Theory Of Knowledge: Structures And Processes|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FmptDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA165|date=27 October 2016|publisher=World Scientific|isbn=978-981-4522-69-4|page=165}}

Other authors call zero order meta-knowledge first order knowledge, and call first order meta-knowledge second order knowledge; meta-knowledge is also known as higher order knowledge.Pedersen, Nikolaj Jl Linding, and Christoph Kelp. "Second-Order Knowledge." The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge, 2010. 586-596.

Meta-knowledge is a fundamental conceptual instrument in such research and scientific domains as, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, and others dealing with study and operations on knowledge, seen as a unified object/entities, abstracted from local conceptualizations and terminologies.

Examples of the first-level individual meta-knowledge are methods of planning, modeling, tagging, learning and every modification of a domain knowledge.

Indeed, universal meta-knowledge frameworks have to be valid for the organization of meta-levels of individual meta-knowledge.

Meta-knowledge may be automatically harvested from electronic publication archives, to reveal patterns in research, relationships between researchers and institutions and to identify contradictory results.