Assignment 5B

When Weinberger mentions “the infrastructure of knowledge” he means the coming together of how knowledge is produced. He mentions an attribution of various believers of knowledge and their ideas. For example he mentions one infrastructure of knowledge is to use a data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy pyramid, or (DIKW). As one way to obtain knowledge, Weinberger says “process the data and you get information…information is to data what wine is to vineyard…” (Weinberger, p. 2). Basically data is needed to construct information. According to Weinberger “you’ve refined the data to produce information, and refined the information to generate something of greater value” (Weinberger, p. 2). Infrastructure of knowledge is a process of retrieving data, finding useful information through that data, and then reducing until you have a know-how understanding. Ackoff, proposed this idea of having a know-how for knowledge, “while information is structured data, knowledge “is actionable information” (Weinberger, p. 3). Coming together as a process, knowledge is the part which illustrates an understanding of information.

However, usually this type of infrastructure from data-information-knowledge-wisdom, is not used today. This is apparent since we have an overload or abundant amount of information compared to back then. For example, “Rather than knowing-by-reducing to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every data in vast, loosely connected webs” (Weinberger, p. 5). This means we are not doing an efficient process of elimination when finding information. Since there is an enormous network of any type of data, this data could be hard to configure. When finding useful information leading to valuable knowledge, we could get tripped up by having too much data that is irrelevant. Instead of using this large network such as google, we could examine small scales. What I mean by this, is we could use the process of reducing to have a structured plan when finding research. As researchers if we understood infrastructure, it would force us to choose valuable knowledge over data. We would recognize the difference between these two easily while finding research.