Information and Communications Technology (ICT): Enables e-knowledge and the reinvention of e-knowledge processes.

Data: A collection of unorganized facts and/or figures.

Information: Data that has been organized in such a way that it achieves meaning, in a generalized way.

Knowledge: Information that is presented within a particular context, yielding insight on application in that context, by members of a community.

e-Knowledge: Digital representations of content and context become e-knowledge through the dynamics of human engagement with them.

Value Chain: A chain of activities and relationships that adds value to business processes. e-Knowledge enables the unbundling and reinvention of traditional value chains for learning and knowledge management and the enterprise activities that depend on them. The traditional value chain can become a value web in tomorrow’s e-knowledge environment.

Content: Objective information, sometimes codified knowledge, sometimes a fusion of data, information, and knowledge that is used to support learning, business applications, and processes.

Context: The setting and conditions in which the content is or can be applied. Content is given different meaning by differing contexts.

Community: The formal and/or informal groupings in which people function when they experience e-knowledge.

Explicit Knowledge: Objective knowledge codified and captured in textbooks, manuals, process descriptions, learning objects, and topical content repositories. Typically, the ‘what’ of knowledge.

Tacit Knowledge: Insights, intuitions, and subjective knowledge that constitute the intellectual capital of most organizations. Advanced knowledge management focuses on tacit knowledge. Typically, the ‘how’ (process) of knowledge acquisition and application.

Knowledge Management (KM): The practice of nurturing, collecting, managing, sharing, and updating the knowledge resources of an enterprise e-Knowledge Marketplaces: Repositories that are set up to encourage and enable the exchange of the elements of e-knowledge. Over time, horizontal marketplaces will cut across industry, disciplinary, and enterprise boundaries.

e-Knowledge Industry: The full range of enterprises that provide and/or use
e-knowledge constitutes the e-Knowledge Industry.

Intellectual Capital: The sum and synergy of an organization’s knowledge, experiences, relationships, processes, discoveries, innovations, and market presence

The Semantic Web: (An initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium). In the Knowledge Age, networked information will develop from both the syntax and the semantics of e-knowledge. Computer applications will be able to handle meaning and context from metadata (data used to describe the content of knowledge objects).