This has led Israeli researcher Chaim Zins 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 (what Zins terms, 'universal' or 'collective') or both. Reviews of textbooks and a survey of scholars in relevant fields indicate that there is not a consensus as to definitions used in the model, and even less 'in the description of the processes that transform elements lower in the hierarchy into those above them'. 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 has been limited direct discussion of the hierarchy'. Meanwhile, Zins' extensive analysis of the conceptualizations of data, information, and knowledge, in his recent research study, makes no explicit commentary on wisdom, although some of the citations included by Zins do make mention of the term. Jennifer Rowley noted in 2007 that there was 'little reference to wisdom' in discussion of the DIKW in recently published college textbooks, and does not include wisdom in her own definitions following that research. In 1994 Nathan Shedroff presented the DIKW hierarchy in an information design context which later appeared as a book chapter. 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. Although Ackoff did not present the hierarchy graphically, he has also been credited with its representation as a pyramid. Ackoff's version of the model includes an understanding tier (as Adler had, before him ), interposed between knowledge and wisdom. Subsequent authors and textbooks cite Ackoff's as the 'original articulation' of the hierarchy or otherwise credit Ackoff with its proposal. 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. although he actually made no reference to any such graphical model.' Zeleny 'has frequently been credited with proposing the. Thereafter, in 1987, Czechoslovakia-born educator Milan Zeleny mapped the elements of the hierarchy to knowledge forms: know-nothing, know-what, know-how, and know-why. 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. Other early versions (prior to 1982) of the hierarchy that refer to a data tier include those of Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and sociologist-historian Daniel Bell. 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. 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.
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. Wallace, a professor of library and information science, explained that the origin of the DIKW pyramid is uncertain:
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In addition to a hierarchy and a pyramid, the DIKW model has also been characterized as a chain, as a framework, as a series of graphs, and as a continuum. Not all versions of the DIKW model reference all four components (earlier versions not including data, later versions omitting or downplaying wisdom), and some include additional components. 'Typically information is defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge'.
The DIKW pyramid, also known variously as the DIKW hierarchy, wisdom hierarchy, knowledge hierarchy, information hierarchy, and the data pyramid, refers loosely to a class of models for representing purported structural and/or functional relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.