DIKW pyramid


The DIKW pyramid, also known variously as the knowledge pyramid, knowledge hierarchy, information hierarchy, DIKW hierarchy, wisdom hierarchy, data pyramid, and information pyramid, sometimes also stylized as a chain, refer to models of possible structural and functional relationships between a set of components—often four, data, information, knowledge, and wisdom—models that had antecedents prior to the 1980s. In the latter years of that decade, interest in the models grew after explicit presentations and discussions, including from Milan Zeleny, Russell Ackoff, and Robert W. Lucky. Subsequent important discussions extended along theoretical and practical lines into the coming decades.
While debate continues as to actual meaning of the component terms of DIKW-type models, and the actual nature of their relationships—including occasional doubt being cast over any simple, linear, unidirectional model—even so they have become very popular visual representations in use by business, the military, and others. Among the academic and popular, not all versions of the DIKW-type models include all four components. In addition, DIKW-type models are no longer always presented as pyramids, instead also as a chart or framework, as flow diagrams, and sometimes as a continuum.

Short description

As Rowley noted in 2007, the DIKW model "is often quoted, or used implicitly, in definitions of data, information and knowledge in the information management, information systems and knowledge management literatures, but there ha been limited direct discussion of the hierarchy". Reviews of textbooks and a survey of scholars in relevant fields indicate that there was not a consensus as to definitions used in the model as of that date, and as reviewed by Liew in that year, even less "in the description of the processes that transform components lower in the hierarchy into those above them".
Zins work, published in 2007—from studies in 2003-2005 that documented "130 definitions of data, information, and knowledge formulated by 45 scholars", published in 2007—to suggest that the data–information–knowledge components of DIKW refer to a class of no less than five models, as a function of whether data, information, and knowledge are each conceived of as subjective, objective or both. In Zins' usage, subjective and objective "are not related to arbitrariness and truthfulness, which are usually attached to the concepts of subjective knowledge and objective knowledge". Information science, Zins argues, studies data and information, but not knowledge, as knowledge is an internal rather than an external phenomenon.

Representations

Graphical representation

DIKW is a hierarchical model often depicted as a pyramid, sometimes as a chain, with data at its base and wisdom at its apex. Both Zeleny and Ackoff have been credited with originating the pyramid representation, although neither used a pyramid to present their ideas. According to Wallace, Debons and colleagues may have been the first to "present the hierarchy graphically".
Many variations of the DIKW-type pyramid have been produced. One, in use by knowledge managers in the United States Department of Defense, attempts to show the DIKW progression to enable effective decisions and consequent activities supporting shared understanding throughout defense organizations, as well as supporting management of risks associated with decisions.
DIKW-type hierarchical information paradigms have also been represented as two-dimensional charts,and as flow diagrams, where relationships between the components may be presented less hierarchically, with defining aspects of the relationships, feedback loops, etc.

Computational representation

Intelligent decision support systems are trying to improve decision making by introducing new technologies and methods from the domain of modeling and simulation in general, and in particular from the domain of intelligent software agents in the contexts of agent-based modeling.
The following example describes a military decision support system, but the architecture and underlying conceptual idea are transferable to other application domains:
  • The value chain starts with data quality describing the information within the underlying command and control systems.
  • Information quality tracks the completeness, correctness, currency, consistency and precision of the data items and information statements available.
  • Knowledge quality deals with procedural knowledge and information embedded in the command and control system such as templates for adversary forces, assumptions about entities such as ranges and weapons, and doctrinal assumptions, often coded as rules.
  • Awareness quality measures the degree of using the information and knowledge embedded within the command and control system. Awareness is explicitly placed in the cognitive domain.
By the introduction of a common operational picture, data are put into context, which leads to information instead of data. The next step, which is enabled by service-oriented web-based infrastructures, is the use of models and simulations for decision support. Simulation systems are the prototype for procedural knowledge, which is the basis for knowledge quality. Finally, using intelligent software agents to continually observe the battle sphere, apply models and simulations to analyze what is going on, to monitor the execution of a plan, and to do all the tasks necessary to make the decision maker aware of what is going on, command and control systems could even support situational awareness, the level in the value chain traditionally limited to pure cognitive methods.

History

Danny P. Wallace, a professor of library and information science, explained that the origin of the DIKW pyramid is uncertain:
The presentation of the relationships among data, information, knowledge, and sometimes wisdom in a hierarchical arrangement has been part of the language of information science for many years. Although it is uncertain when and by whom those relationships were first presented, the ubiquity of the notion of a hierarchy is embedded in the use of the acronym DIKW as a shorthand representation for the data-to-information-to-knowledge-to-wisdom transformation.
Many authors think that the idea of the DIKW relationship originated from two lines in the poem "Choruses", by T. S. Eliot, that appeared in the pageant play The Rock, in 1934:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom

In 1927, Clarence W. Barron addressed his employees at Dow Jones & Company on the hierarchy: "Knowledge, Intelligence and Wisdom".

Data, information, knowledge

In 1955, English-American economist and educator Kenneth Boulding presented a variation on the hierarchy consisting of "signals, messages, information, and knowledge". However, "he first author to distinguish among data, information, and knowledge and to also employ the term 'knowledge management' may have been American educator Nicholas L. Henry", in a 1974 journal article.

Data, information, knowledge, wisdom

Other early versions of the hierarchy that refer to a data tier include those of Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and sociologist-historian Daniel Bell.. In 1980, Irish-born engineer Mike Cooley invoked the same hierarchy in his critique of automation and computerization, in his book Architect or Bee?: The Human / Technology Relationship.
Thereafter, in 1987, Czechoslovakia-born educator Milan Zeleny mapped the components of the hierarchy to knowledge forms: know-nothing, know-what, know-how, and know-why. Zeleny "has frequently been credited with proposing the ... although he actually made no reference to any such graphical model."
The hierarchy appears again in a 1988 address to the International Society for General Systems Research, by American organizational theorist Russell Ackoff, published in 1989. Subsequent authors and textbooks cite Ackoff's as the "original articulation" of the hierarchy or otherwise credit Ackoff with its proposal. Ackoff's version of the model includes an understanding tier, interposed between knowledge and wisdom. Although Ackoff did not present the hierarchy graphically, he has also been credited with its representation as a pyramid.
In 1989, Bell Labs veteran Robert W. Lucky wrote about the four-tier "information hierarchy" in the form of a pyramid in his book Silicon Dreams. In the same year as Ackoff presented his address, information scientist Anthony Debons and colleagues introduced an extended hierarchy, with "events", "symbols", and "rules and formulations" tiers ahead of data. In 1994 Nathan Shedroff presented the DIKW hierarchy in an information design context.
Jennifer Rowley noted in 2007 that as of that date there was "little reference to wisdom" in discussions of the DIKW in published college textbooks, and she at times did not include wisdom in her own discussion of her research. Meanwhile, Chaim Zins' extensive primary research analysis conceptualizing data, information, and knowledge in that same year makes no explicit comment regarding wisdom, although citations included by Zins do make mention of the term,

Definitions and conceptions of the four DIKW components

In 2013, Baskarada and Koronios attempted a relatively thorough review of the definitions of individual components, to that date.

Data

In the context of DIKW-type models, data is conceived, per Zins' 2007 formulation, as being composed of symbols or signs, representing stimuli or signals, that, in Rowley words, are "of no use until... in a usable form". Zeleny characterized this non-usable characteristic of data as "know-nothing".
The view in 2007 was that in some cases, data are understood to refer not only to symbols, but also to signals or stimuli referred to by such symbols—what Zins terms "subjective data". "niversal data", on the other hand, for Rowley, are "the product of "observation", while subjective data are the observations. This distinction is often obscured in definitions of data in terms of "facts".