![[photo-1555370188-db06c4b2f2e7.jpg]] Photo by [Bruno Mira](https://unsplash.com/@brunomira?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/5sPTYiCclKg?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) I recently started to struggle with this question, because (I realized) we seriously don't have a definition of knowledge unit and it just happened to me that I wanted to express the amount of knowledge necessary for the description of the entity in MetaSystems and I couldn’t find any relevant definition of knowledge unit…   Somebody suggested, it's a "question", or in the other words, the basic unit of knowledge is the most narrow and focused question that we can formulate about knowledge. I can't agree with this statement, because the question doesn't necessarily represent knowledge, it just identifies the need for knowledge. Others suggested that in the information technology domain, it's one “bit”. I would argue with that statement either, I believe that one bit is just a data unit, not the information. Information is something that brings meaning (knowledge) about particular data and this ultimately represents a knowledge unit itself. I recently read in one paper that "**A knowledge unit defines a coherent collection of subject matter**", which seems to be true, however it doesn't specify the UNIT itself nor the connection with the world outside of the unit. > Ricardo R. Gudwin in his article "Computational Semiotics" provides his own definition: "A Knowledge Unit is a granule of information encoded into a structure". I believe, it's a deeper philosophical discussion, but generally, if we can translate this to IT and connect it with semantic ontologies, it seems that knowledge unit could be "information entity" or "information bit”, whatever we call it. The point is, knowledge unit could be defined by semantic description and knowledge unit doesn’t necessarily represent simple or complex knowledge, it’s just “knowledge piece inside broader structure” which is a fundamental part of knowledge unit definition. Knowledge is useless without structure, so semantic ontology is the structure that hosts knowledge units or entities and this give us the answer to the question “What is the unit of knowledge”.   The unit of knowledge is “identified” information structure (identified by semantic ontology), with at least “one” information inside. This brings us to knowledge unit name and abbreviation, which could be one “Information Bit” (1 Ib) or “Information Entity” (IE). As an example14 IE, means 14 Information Entities, which means 14 individual Information structures (each one with at least one information inside) and this equals 14+ information. It’s really important to understand that each information entity could represent a different level of detail (or abstraction) with different levels of information granularity inside the structure. ![[Pasted image 20230708133128.png|Figure 1: Information Entities (IE)]] An interesting fact with information units is that some of them contain other units, which shows the complexity of the knowledge unit calculation problem. In our last example, we had 14 IE (knowledge unites), however some of them are simple, others are highly complex. So, the knowledge unit just gives us an idea about unit numbers, not necessary unit size nor speed of unit compilation, etc.   --- I believe, Information Entity or knowledge unit calculation is a very interesting area and I will definitively include this into MetaX (Semantic-based MetaSystems) methodology as a knowledge unit calculation method for knowledge identification, translation, design, and usage. Any ideas and comments are welcome! ## Related to [[Is MetaX a Knowledge System]]