DIKW from Japanese Garden
This blog is my summary from K. White’ session in Alpha Academy
Despite the fact that there is a wealth of material about DIKW on the internet, the session with K. White provided an illustrative implication that helped me better understand them. As a result, I incorporate it into my blog.
The DIKW Pyramid
This is the model for representing the relationship between four entities: data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. To synthesize the higher-stage, we depend on more information from the lower tier.
They can be described as follows:
Data — something that is in pure form, no meaning, such as fact, signal or symbol.
Information — The meaning or context that recalls a pattern or group of data.
Knowledge — If you discover a pattern or a series of repetitions of information that is useful and applicable, you have discovered knowledge.
Wisdom — The ability to use a body of knowledge to create something that responds to the Why of social norms.
All begins with data and progresses to the upper layer.
If all you have is data, you’ll have no idea what it means or how useful it is.
If you have others but data, you won’t know whether it’s true or not.
The Japanese Zen Garden
One example of a garden with a lot of details is the Japanese zen garden. We’ll attempt to map to the DIKW model as follows:
Data — A number of white gravels, A large stone
Information — The gravel forms a wave-like pattern.
Knowledge —If the pattern of the gravels resembles a wave, then the gravels themselves resemble water. Furthermore, the vertical stone resembles a tree.
Wisdom —The depiction of water and trees that do not exist implies invisibility, nothing, or incompleteness, all of which are Zen philosophical concepts.
Finally, you can apply knowledge and wisdom to anything if you can extract and simplify them. Architects, for example, may incorporate Zen philosophy into the design of a building.
