ON VISUALIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION: THE ROLE OF SMART TECHNOLOGIES
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2018-4-12-48
The paper touches upon the issue of knowledge and information visualization, and the epistemological status of this process in terms of progressive development and application of smart technologies. The issue of visualization in general, and the visualization of knowledge in particular, is a controversial question. Due to this reason, there exist a number of approaches to the understanding of visualization mechanisms. However, with all the variety of approaches, their similarity is found in the sense that visualization of knowledge is the subjective need of a person to clarify the content of knowledge and make it meaningful for him/her and others. To visualize knowledge means “to know”, “to recognize”, “to decipher” what it is filled with. Without such a component, cognition or knowledge (as a result of knowledge) does not exist. However, under the conditions of active use of smart technologies, a person faces an ever-increasing amount of information and the improvement of methods for its processing, storage and distribution. There is a need to clarify the issue of the similarity or difference of the nature of visualization of knowledge and information. This problem can be solved by the identification of the nature and characteristics of information and knowledge. During the course of the research, a number of philosophical and scientific concepts are considered. The appeal to the philosophical concepts of Plato and Aristotle allows drawing an analogy regarding the nature of information and knowledge through the diversification of differences in the nature of the world of ideas (eidos) and the world of things. It is stated that the resulting model comes across paradoxical consequences, which consist in the fact that information and knowledge are of different nature: objective and subjective, one of which loses its essence in the attempt to connect them with each other. It turns out that interaction is possible only when the nature of one of the phenomena is transformed into the nature of the other, and this does not allow modeling the process of interaction between knowledge and information in a clear form. A parallel is drawn with modern scientific approaches in the field of natural sciences and computer science (Heisenberg, Shannon, Wiener), which come to similar results in studying the nature of information and knowledge, which see the information basis (model) of the world, similar to the Platonic world of ideas, in mathematical programs. It turns out that knowledge has a subjective nature, a person forms knowledge, and visualization is a natural form and stage of the process of cognition. Information has an objective nature, therefore, acts as an appropriate basis of our world. Visualization in this regard is not a natural form of the functioning of information, in contrast to knowledge, because it exists independently of a person. It becomes possible to visualize information only when it is transformed into knowledge and changes its nature. Smart technologies present the process of inverse knowledge, during the course of which the subject as a source of knowledge forms intentions of the external world in relation to its meanings. Smart technologies, whose main function is that their developers are assigned the function of the subject, direct the cognitive process in the opposite direction: from the subject to the external world, trying to transform knowledge into information (the most vivid example of such a transformation is artificial intelligence). In this case, visualization does not play such a significant role as in knowledge.
Keywords: visualization, knowledge, information, epistemology, idea, thing, smart technologies
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Issue: 4, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 12 — 48
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