Context is like baking a cake
Data is information. Data is not knowledge. No more than a bowl of flour, some eggs, sugar & butter is a cake.
A Tag is data. Sometimes it has information. Like if your flour is cake flour, but is still not a cake.
Just as you mix ingredients & bake a cake, you need to mix tags to bake context.
Don’t put that in the oven! That’s the dry stuff, you need to add eggs.
You can then put it in the oven. Or, add chocolate. You’ve reached the point where you’re pairing context with content. Chocolate isn’t needed to bake a cake, it’s needed to make the cake chocolate. It’s an added ingredient, not foundational, so it is content.
And once you bake a Chocolate cake round, you’re not done yet. Now, you add more variation. Strawberry jam to separate 2 or 3 rounds. You bundled knowledge inside more knowledge, generating more context and content. Then, you clothe the rounds in chocolate ganache. and ganache to cover it. So, you have data, context, content, knowledge, and at each stage, you use. Now, instead of a cake round, you have a cake containing 2 or 3 instances of cake rounds. Now you have a Chocolate cake with Strawberry jam & ganache. Hungry yet?
But wait, there’s more! Using a pipette, and pink & white buttercream, you make little flowers. And with a smaller pipette & melted white chocolate, and a little skill, you write “Happy Birthday, Mom” on it. Make sure you spell that right. Now, is the baker baking a cake for his mom or for a customer’s mom?
He delivers the cake personally to a friend to give to her Mother. So it was an act of friendship. Or an apology. Maybe he baked a cake for his wife’s mother
It seems to never end. A story is rolled up into a larger story, adding more context as we go. When does it end?
It’s up to you. Do you want to know who the Baker gave the cake to, and why? Let’s say, the Baker gave a cake to his ex-girlfriend for her mom as a peace offering after a bad breakup. The Milk-maiden he had an affair with split & ran away with the Milk man. He’s hoping to win his ex-girlfriend back or at least make peace with her as he eyes his hot new accountant.
The Bus of life goes on, we get off where we choose to get off.
Knowledge in its connectedness if infinite, there is no bottom or top except for the point were we answered our original question. And at some point we abandon the course of inquiry, life’s just too short.
The practicality of this fanciful exercise is this: Humanity has a vast database. We derive knowledge from that data-pool by asking questions, and following a course of inquiry, collecting more data on the way. By letting it lead us to content & learning that content, you acquire knowledge.
Data is recombinant, stackable, encapsulated to our specifications, resulting in knowledge.
The final context is, a 3-layer chocolate cake with strawberry jam & ganache frosting with little buttercream flowers as a gift from the baker to your mother on her birthday. And now this whole exercise is clear.
You have gained wisdom.
knowledge as context & content
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