We assume many of you are familiar with the work of Clifford Stoll, author of both “The Cuckoo’s Egg” and “Silicon Snake Oil.” The latter, which was written 15 years ago, stated, “the Internet provides a vast amount of data. But there’s a wide gulf between data and information. There’s a long distance from information to knowledge.”
The idea certainly isn’t uniquely Stoll’s. In fact, there’s a long history of the “Information Pyramid,” of Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom; it’s probably more applicable today than ever.
This is particularly pointed out by a quite interesting piece by Cisco on “Top 25 Technology Predictions,” as discussed with the author at Webtorials. Many of the predictions that Dave Evans made have to do with the vast proliferation of data. But this makes us wonder, with all this “data,” where will the knowledge and wisdom come from?
So here’s our take: Data is relatively useless until it is organized into some form of “information.” As a trivial example, you might collect data via a survey, and it becomes information when it is organized into a pie chart or a bar chart. But this assumes, of course, that the data has value (derived from knowledge and wisdom), in that an appropriate question was asked in the first place.
And here’s where we really get to the tough part. Once the information, which was assumed to have some validity, is available, how does one interpret that data? And our answer is that simply presenting a chart without context is far short of knowledge. For it to be useful as “knowledge,” multiple related variables must be taken into account and correlated to put the “information” into a proper context.
But then there’s wisdom. And perhaps the most important component of wisdom is experience. The knowledge must in particular be put into an historical perspective. “Wisdom” is the ability to put this information into a meaningful context.
Communications protocols are a perfect example. We’ve been around long enough such that the first packet switching protocol we learned was X.25. And all of the subsequent “new” protocols – SNA, frame relay, ATM, SMDS, TCP, IP, RTP, UDP – have essentially been variations on a theme. And it takes knowledge of the advantages (and disadvantages) of each of the prior protocols to bring wisdom to the discussion of these other protocols.
We fear that wisdom is severely lacking in the world today, and that perhaps we, as technologists, are at least partially responsible for helping to create this monster. Now we must work to tame it.
Next time, we’ll look at this phenomenon in the context of social networking. And in the meantime, we invite you to join the discussion of “DIKW” at Webtorials.
