One of the precious legacies I keep from my brief stint as a philosophy student is the lack of trust in “knowledge”. That is, I tend to question what we assume that knowledge is, and look for its source. I remember the evenings I spent at the university library reading Peirce‘s “How to make our ideas clear”.
So, when I found at the appropriately named Information is Beautiful blog an interesting post comprising this beautiful graphic. I felt compelled to share it with you.
I think that this graphic represents quite well the relationship between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, and how we construct our thought from raw data towards wisdom. I browsed the comments in the original post and found a link to the DIKW model in the Wikipedia, and learned that this model is already well-known.
It is really amazing how in this hyperlink days we can go gather data and information at the speed of light. Unfortunately it seems wisdom is still analogue.
Javier Gala 