We are witnessing the beginning of a new era of knowledge economy and information society, which can be jointly called the era of knowledge and informational civilization. In this era, it is necessary to better understand the processes of knowledge creation. Philosophy has investigated knowledge creation for millennia, but concentrated in the last fifty years on macro-theories of knowledge creation on a grand historical scale; knowledge economy, on the other hand, needs microtheories of knowledge creation applicable to today and tomorrow. Therefore, many new micro-theories of knowledge and technology creation have emerged in the last decade of the 20th Century and in the beginning years of the 21st Century from fields outside of philosophy. This book contains an integration of such diverse micro-theories of knowledge creation, needed as the foundation for diverse applications in knowledge management and knowledge engineering to provide the reader a better understanding of knowledge creation processes, which is necessary at the beginning stages of the knowledge and informational civilization era.
