Knowledge distance in information systems

Abstract

In this paper, we first introduce the concepts of knowledge closeness and knowledge distance for measuring the sameness and the difference among knowledge in an information system, respectively. The relationship between these two concepts is a strictly mutual complement relation. We then investigate some important properties of knowledge distance and perform experimental analyses on two public data sets, which show the presented measure appears to be well suited to characterize the nature of knowledge in an information system. Finally, we establish the relationship between the knowledge distance and knowledge granulation, which shows that two variants of the knowledge distance can also be used to construct the knowledge granulation. These results will be helpful for studying uncertainty in information systems.