Big Data, the Internet of Things, and the Revised Knowledge Pyramid

The knowledge pyramid has been used for several years to illustrate the hierarchical relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. An earlier version of this paper presented a revised knowledge-KM pyramid that included processes such as filtering and sense making, reversed the pyramid by positing there was more knowledge than data, and showed knowledge management as an extraction of the pyramid. This paper expands the revised knowledge pyramid to include the Internet of Things and Big Data. The result is a revision of the data aspect of the knowledge pyramid. Previous thought was of data as reflections of reality as recorded by sensors. Big Data and the Internet of Things expand sensors and readings to create two layers of data. The top layer of data is the traditional transaction / operational data and the bottom layer of data is an expanded set of data reflecting massive data sets and sensors that are near mirrors of reality. The result is a knowledge pyramid that appears as an hourglass.