[nekopa]

I wonder if more than you think is actually relevant to you? The old adage is you get data, give it structure and it becomes information. I am thinking that maybe nowadays we need the next level: get information, give it 'structure' and it becomes... What?

I've been thinking about this a lot recently due to an article here on HN about the fact that we are getting lots of 'data' recently in the form of scandalous articles in the media, which shock and dismay us, but are we tying these all together into a larger picture? I don't think so, therefore we end up with the modern day equivalent of shamans - conspiracy theorists. They see the 'data' (or nowadays in its current higher level form information) and give us 'information' about what it means (sorry, I'm still struggling with what the higher form of information is).

Shamans saw dark clouds on the horizon and said the gods were angry, conspiracy theorists see the NSA spying and say 'illuminati'

Now I've done a fair bit of work on KMSs (knowledge management systems) and that could be one view, structured information becomes knowledge. But I think that that is somehow missing the point. Information+structure+experience+remembrance = knowledge (one way of looking at it IMHO) So I'm searching for an other, different way to think about this issue, because that doesn't quite seem to fit the bill here.

Is the path data>information>knowledge>wisdom ? Or are we missing steps, or even missing completely different paths?

Or is it not even a path, but more of a n-dimensional network that is recursive in time and size?

Maybe this should be the future focus of technologies.

[anonyfox]

Very interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing! Let's try to map it to a somewhat simplified system:

data = many news-websites out there

|

v

information = RSS/Atom News Items of the sites above (basic data structure, highly available today)

|

v

knowledge = ??

|

v

wisdom = ??

... Do you have some ideas floating around how this concrete example could be expanded further?

[nekopa]

I think you have to shift the graph: what you have under info- rss atom etc, should move up to the data position.

Then what? You could do something simple like keyword grouping - '500 news events including the word "drone"' but I feel that is not enough. Take it further and use semantics to do sentiment analysis maybe? '50 data point talking positively about airbnb today'

But I still think there is something missing. I'm interested in any other thoughts you may have, especially after shifting info-now down to data, what would be 'new' knowledge or wisdom?

[anonyfox]

Okay, my thoughts now are something like this:

data: RSS/Atom stuff

information: do a basic keyword-analysis of the news snippets, maybe with some natural language processing, push it all into a graph database, using meaningful nouns as nodes and verbs as edges. Think of something like DBpedia, but with tiny information pieces and high interconnectedness between. This would be good structured "information", right?

knowledge: define some sophisticated query language / data endpoint, ideally again with some natural language processing, to discover the informations in the graph. the result of such a sophisticated query i'd call 'knowledge'.

wisdom: ?? <-- no idea yet, sorry.