What do life and knowledge engineering have in common? Everything. There, that’s all keywords from the topic. But I guess you’d like a little more detail.

Knowledge engineering in a nutshell

Knowledge engineers gather and process knowledge or design systems to do that. Suppose you are designing a successful WWW search engine or a social whatever tags whatever community – voilà, that’s knowledge engineering you’re doing. Suppose you are analyzing a few million data sets to find patterns – that’s knowledge engineering (or, more specifically, data exploration).

Knowledge engineering is a real-world job. As such, large parts of it have a sound theoretical basis (and that’s mathematical soundness), but a lot of it is based on experience. Real-world problems are usually complex, so you have to know what to look for when breaking them down into something that you can solve.

Life in a nutshell

Humans gather and process knowledge or cooperate with others to do that. Suppose you are trying to juggle your job with a social life and dreams you want to fulfill – voilà, that’s living you’re doing. Suppose you’re trying to understand the things everyone’s throwing at you – that’s life.

Life is a real-world job. As such, parts of it are pre-defined (courtesy of genetics), but a lot of it is based on experience. Life problems are usually complex, so you have to know what to look for when breaking them down into something you can solve.

Look at the title of this website… “life and knowledge engineering”. In a way, it’s also about “life engineering”. That’s not a real term but given this post, its meaning should be clear.

Surely it’s not that easy?

Of course it isn’t. Still, what’s to say knowledge engineering and life can’t learn from each other? Maybe you could derive techniques from knowledge engineering to understand yourself better. Maybe, from experience in your life, you can give pointers to knowledge engineering to solve complicated problems. Maybe the two are fairly similar in a way. Let’s try and find out!

Outlook

In the next few articles I am going to look into what I feel are the biggest problems in life and knowledge engineering, and we’ll see where it goes from there. Also, I will start collecting and sharing insights that help with mastering everything life and knowledge engineering throw at you.