Posted by Clive Flory on April 10, 1998 at 21:46:23:

In Reply to: Information, Knowledge & Wisdom: Whose Concerns? posted by Yogesh Malhotra on April 09, 1998 at 13:16:34:

Some commentary on the posted Message.
A very personal view and opinion

There appears to be 4 key components .

Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

The relationships appear to be

Data : Primary building block ie the basic unit of knowing . For example
July , Sales, $300,000 or Product. XYZ, 20%
Each unit of data on its own is meaningless.

Information : For information to be derived 3 objects are involved
1. The Form of the Data
2. The Recipient of the formed data ( this could be a human or a software agent)
3. Knowledge of the semantics of the Data Elements

For a packet of data to become Information it has to
a. be arranged "In a FORM" that is meaningful and
b. The recipient has to provide or be provided the context.

Eg: Sales for the month of July was $300,000 or
The product XYZ has 20% of the market

In the above examples
a. the Form is important
b. The person must know the meaning of the words Sales, July, $300,000
c. Must have a context . ie What Company , What Industry, What is typical for that Industry for the month of July etc

There is a difference between Interesting information and Valuable information. Knowing the sales figure for a company and product line that is foreign to you may be interesting but may not be valuable. However if the information was for one of your competitors then he information becomes increasingly valuable.

KNOWLEDGE : A person or Organisation is deemed knowledgeable usually within specific fields of interests or human endeavor. In general

a. They have a lot of packets of Information and
b. They have organized or arranged this set of Information into some logical order, framework etc

In constructing ones knowledge there is some degree of abstraction but it occurs only within the particular field . So a person can be said to be very knowledgeable about making bread or growing tulips or writing science fiction.

WISDOM: Wisdom is the highest level of abstraction of our experiences. A person or Organisation is deemed Wise if they have distilled and abstracted a set of principles that apply to a broader set of fields of knowledge. A part from the abstraction the Wise person understands the consequence's of an action. The wiser the person the longer the casual chain they can construct. Ie the more holistic their view of life.

PATTERNS
At the end of the day humans and Organisations are involved in Pattern recognition. Data is the starting point in this process. For a pattern to emerge there has to be some repetition of an event . Once an Information set contains repeating events eg the sales for 3 Julys 96, 97 and 98 then we can say that a potential pattern is embedded in the information. Discovering that pattern then becomes the key .
The knowledge phase is when patterns have been detected and put within a framework . Abstracting patterns across seemingly dissimilar experiences and seeing some relationship is the starting point to wisdom. The ability to distill from the details the essence or core of a phenomenon is at the heart of seeing in a "wise way" and Understanding the true causes of things is to be able to see nature working as it is as opposed to imagining it work the way of our concepts. To be truly wise we have to observe nature functioning directly and not through the lens of human concepts which we endlessly invent.

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Information, Knowledge & Wisdom: Whose Concerns? jaz_74 17:25:07 11/30/98 (0)
• Re: Information, Knowledge & Wisdom: Whose Concerns? Bruce Gold 12:49:34 10/06/98 (0)
• Re: Information, Knowledge & Wisdom: Whose Concerns? Bruce Gold 15:32:06 10/05/98 (0)

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