In 1934, mourning the loss of meaning, T.S.Eliot, in his play The Rock, presented wisdom, knowledge, and information in a hierarchical structure. Fifty years later, data was added to these three and the DIKW hierarchy, or pyramid, was born. While information science sees problems in this, it is nonetheless a functional model —information is contextualized data, knowledge is contextualized information, and wisdom is contextualized knowledge.
In 1979, Frank Zappa perhaps identified 'truth' as the context of wisdom:
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Ultimately, reality is ineffable truth; perception of it is informed by the meaning it has for individual beings, which then guides the choices they make, determining their future as well as that of their society, species, and environment.
Although united by meaning, beings are also set apart by it. Natural language evolved to negotiate this variability. However, the subject of information science is the coding needed by machines to parse data.
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The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff.. in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934.. from the poem The Rock by T.S. Eliot. (And for now we can skip over the 1979 reference in the song "Packard Goose" by Frank Zappa.) The sequence seems to have been reinvented in the late 1980s, independent of these poetic invocations.
..in his address accepting the presidency of the International Society for General Systems Research..
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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
from the pageant play, 'The Rock', written by T.S.Eliot in collaboration with the musician Martin Shaw. The complete text of this, Choruses from 'The Rock', was published as part of the edition of Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1962.
The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff.. in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934.. from the poem The Rock by T.S. Eliot. (And for now we can skip over the 1979 reference in the song "Packard Goose" by Frank Zappa.) The sequence seems to have been reinvented in the late 1980s, independent of these poetic invocations.