Metaknowledge or
meta-knowledge is
knowledge about a preselected knowledge.
For the reason of different definitions of knowledge in the subject matter literature, meta-information is or is not included in meta-knowledge. Detailed cognitive, systemic and
epistemic study of human knowledge requires a distinguishing of these concepts. but in the common language knowledge includes information, and, for example,
bibliographic data are considered as a meta-knowledge.
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. According to the TOGA meta-theory, the procedures, methodologies and strategies of teaching, coordination of e-learning courses are individual
meta-meta-knowledge of an intelligent entity (a
person,
organization or
society).
Of course, universal meta-knowledge frameworks have to be valid for the organization of meta-levels of individual meta-knowledge.
Metaknowledge may be automatically harvested from electronic publication archives, to reveal patterns in research, relationships between researchers and institutions and to identify contradictory results.