Data - Information - Knowledge - Wisdom

I attended a presentation at the Pre-IFLA conference in Toronto hosted by Lain G.M. Ruus (University of Toronto, Data Library Services). As experienced data specialists she argued that the future of libraries is that they "dare to deal not just with information, but a step earlier in the process, with data". Now that we are using the Internet intensively, should we all believe what has been published. With a bit of common-sense we know that we always need to question the data. One example she used to stress this out was about a website which argued that 130 % of all Palestinians are Muslim. This information is obviously incorrect. However, after the information we all need to know what the data is behind the information. People need to become information literate, or in this case, data literate. In order to become data literate, people should analyse the data with their knowledge. Having said this, I stress out that the visualisation of the data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid cannot be used to illustrate mutual relationships (see image). All the different parts are not gradually related; they are all related with each other.