Posted by Bruce Gold on October 06, 1998 at 12:49:34:

In Reply to: Re: Information, Knowledge & Wisdom: Whose Concerns? posted by Clive Flory on April 10, 1998 at 21:46:23:

Hi Clive
This is interesting but perhaps we can clarify it a bit.
Data
information
knowledge
wisdom/ understanding

The relationships appear to be

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

I would add here that data itself is not free standing and exists only in relation to the process that generated it i.e. the question, the measurement method, the underlying theory and assumptions etc. These element come from knowledge/wisdom/understanding making the whole knowledge process reflexive and reiterative.

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.

E.g.: 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 . i.e. What Company , What Industry, What is typical for that
Industry for the month of July etc.

Yes but I think what we are really getting at is pattern. Data becomes information when it can be fit into a pattern of data that has meaning.

KNOWLEDGE : A person or Organization 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.

Again yes but we should remember that all knowledge exists in relationship to something. No view without a viewpoint. Knowledge is when information can be set into wider patterns and contexts.

WISDOM: Wisdom is the highest level of abstraction of our experiences. A person or
Organization 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. I.e. the more holistic their view of life.

PATTERNS
At the end of the day humans and Organizations 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 e.g. 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.

I agree there is an increasing element of pattern recognition and increasing abstraction as we move from data to wisdom. The process from data to knowledge is relatively mechanical since one is using some intellectual system or other to move from observation to pattern recognition. The move from knowledge to wisdom/understanding is more complex and seems to have a "magical" or spiritual element to it. I don't think anyone has ever been able to "mechanize" this jump from knowledge to the deep gestalt of wisdom/understanding. We just know that we can do it. Such is the doppleganger of those who would expert system or process formula us out of needing human experts. One observation I have made is how this "metaphysical" element is censored out of our knowledge system. If one compares the original works of the our history with the secondary "explainers" that are what we teach we can see this "spiritual" element, like Descartes dream, just drop out of the picture.

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