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According to the Dictionary of Italian language by Tullio De Mauro (De Mauro, 2000), the term knowledge refers to:
…being aware of something (knowing something), to possess a notion, or a set of organized notions, having cognition of something, the activity of knowing through the study, the investigation and its outcome (authors’ translation).
In relation to the concept of knowledge, it becomes necessary to define intelligence, that is (De Mauro, 2000):
…the power of the human mind to understand, think, judge, communicate facts and knowledge, to make judgments and develop solutions in response to external stimuli, to adapt to the environment or to modify it to suit his/her needs (authors’ translation).
However, in recent years, the scientific community gathered around the theme of the Semantic Web, wanted to liberate the concepts of collective and connective intelligence. Gruber asserts to consider inappropriate the use of the term intelligence, a concept that requires intellectual activity and therefore rational, human, because it can’t be, in his opinion, related to a technological system such as the Web (Gruber, 2008).
Gruber often uses the term intelligence as a synonym for knowledge (Gruber, 2008), even if intelligence presupposes cognitive functions, adaptive and imaginative, generated by the human brain, actually not comprised in the set of capabilities and function offered by a computing system.
Polanyi (1966) stated that knowledge can either be explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge is the one we can express through the language, based on propositions and assumptions. Tacit knowledge instead, comes from and is made of experience, so that it cannot be expressed through the language. According to Polanyi,
Tacit knowledge is a form of implicit knowledge we rely on for both learning and acting […]. The 'scientific' account of knowledge as a fully explicit formalizable body of statements did not allow for an adequate account of discovery and growth. […] Knowledge has an ineliminable subjective dimension: we know much more than we can tell.