Tag Archives: knowledge infrastucture

Assignment 5B

When Weinberger mentions ā€œthe infrastructure of knowledgeā€ 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 ā€œprocess the data and you get informationā€¦information is to data what wine is to vineyardā€¦ā€ (Weinberger, p. 2). Basically data is needed to construct information. According to Weinberger ā€œyouā€™ve refined the data to produce information, and refined the information to generate something of greater valueā€ (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, ā€œwhile information is structured data, knowledge ā€œis actionable informationā€ (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, ā€œRather 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 websā€ (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.

Assignment 5B

In his book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger describes the concept of knowledge and how we viewĀ and understand it. By knowledge infrastructure, Weinberger means the organization and structure of knowledge. He believes that knowledge is bases on “credentials” such as degrees and publications and not simple opinions.Ā Ā In chapter one of his book, he talks about the evolution of knowledge, how it canĀ  be shaped through technology. This can be a bad thing, as there is just too much information out there and it becomes difficult to credit information as credible sometimes. He states, ” there way too much bad stuff. We can now see every idiotic idea put forward seriously and every serious idea treated idiotically” (12).Ā  We see this going on with the debate right now, instead of looking at the debate and realizing the importance of the election, there are people on the internet who make memes out of both candidates and this goes viral. However, Weinberger does reinforce that knowledge makes us better researchers as we are should be aware of credible information. When we have credible information and we know it is credible, the reaearching process becomes much easier. Yes, there is an information “overload” as Weinberger puts it, but we have filters. These filters ” increase information and reveal the whole deep sea” ( 13).Ā  There is so much information out there and there is no “running away from knowledge” we just need to know how to require information without overloading our brains.