Knowledge Glossary

Browse 18 knowledge terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

18 Knowledge Terms

Body of Knowledge
The recognized collection of concepts, methods, standards, and practices associated with a profession or discipline. In tech and adjacent fields the phrase...
Bus Factor
The minimum number of team members who would have to be hit by a bus (or otherwise suddenly unavailable) before a project stalls due to lack of knowledge. A...
Bus Factor
The minimum number of team members who would need to be suddenly unavailable (hit by a bus, quit, go on vacation) before a project stalls due to loss of...
Central Repository
A main shared repository or source of record where code, documents, or assets are kept for team use. In culture discussions, the phrase often signals the need...
Code Documentation Culture
A team's shared attitude and habits around documenting code, systems, decisions, and operational knowledge. Good code documentation culture means documentation...
Code Sharing
The practice of sharing code snippets, repositories, patterns, or libraries across teams or communities. Code sharing supports learning and reuse, though it...
Cunningham's law
The observation that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer. Attributed to Ward...
Documentation
Written material that explains systems, decisions, processes, or how to use something. In tech culture documentation is one of the clearest signals of whether...
Documentation Debt
The accumulated cost of missing, outdated, or misleading documentation that makes systems harder to use, debug, or change. Documentation debt compounds quietly...
FAQ Culture
A culture where common questions are documented and reused systematically instead of answered from scratch every time. Strong FAQ culture reduces repetitive...
Knowledge Boundary
The effective boundary around what an AI system knows or can answer reliably, given its training data, retrieval access, and current context. Understanding...
Knowledge Cutoff
The latest point in time up to which a model's training data is known or assumed to reflect information. Knowledge cutoff matters because models without...
Knowledge Graph
A graph of entities and relationships used to represent structured knowledge for retrieval or reasoning. It influences how models are trained, evaluated, or...
Knowledge Update
A change that refreshes what an AI system can access or reflect, whether through retraining, fine-tuning, new retrieval data, or updated memory. Teams use the...
Open Knowledge
Knowledge made openly accessible for use, sharing, and adaptation under terms that allow broad public benefit. In digital culture, open knowledge is a core...
RAG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — a technique that enhances LLM responses by first retrieving relevant documents from an external knowledge base and including...
Semantic Memory
Memory of general facts, concepts, or knowledge rather than specific episodic experiences. In AI system design, the term is used when distinguishing broad...
World Knowledge
General knowledge about facts, concepts, and regularities in the world that a model has learned or can access. World knowledge differs from task-specific or...

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