What processes convert data into information and information into knowledge?

We often use the terms “information” and “knowledge” interchangeably, but there are differences between these concepts. In short,  information is the facts about a subject, whereas knowledge is an understanding of a subject, through either education or experience. In market research, we can translate this as the difference between data and insights. 

In terms of research, “information” is the vast amount of data from many different sources, that we now have available to us. Often, we see it as hundreds of cross-tabs that start to look blurry and takes more energy to ‘tame’ rather than draw conclusions and generate insights. 

Knowledge, or insights, in our case, is the collection of information, followed by processing it into a useful and meaningful story. It’s the application of the data that turns data into insights for storytelling consumer research. Just as necessary is the sharing of these insights, or “knowledge,” across functions of the organization allow for better decision-making. 

Three ways to morph information (data) into knowledge (insights)

It’s true that you can’t attain knowledge without information. The process of going from data to insights can often be a challenge. In today’s fast-paced industry, we must move beyond merely being a collector of data to being a collaborator that can provide insight. By doing so, better business decisions are made, and we become more of a partner with our clients. Technology is helping us get there. 

• Integrate the data: From traditional survey research to sales tracking, from social media and reviews to passive behavioral data, we are trying to bring data together as best we can to gain a complete picture. Unfortunately, this information is often disparate, usually siloed, and most likely underutilized. Finding a solution that can bring it all together, quickly, is the only way to garner knowledge that illustrates the big picture. 
• Investigate the data: The ability to explore and mine consumer research data provides a level of flexibility and creativity to understand the data and draw meaningful conclusions. Easy-to-use charting and features such as built-in significance testing, help users to arrive at conclusions. Leaner organizations and decreased marketing spend means people have to do more with fewer resources. Not everyone is an analytics software expert or has the time to wait a week for their agency to get back to them with a simple recut of their data.
• Visualize and share the data: Consumer research visualization tools that allow non-research people to explore and interact with data can help spread information and provide companies with the opportunity to make decisions collaboratively. These tools can allow for flexibility and 'tiered' access of engagement, while also telling a compelling and accurate story about the insights you've uncovered. The most innovative of these tools can even auto-generate reporting, freeing up time to make business decisions from the data.

The value of consumer research data is only as good as the insights that it generates. To bring these three pieces of the puzzle together, it can be as easy as selecting the right solution. With Harmoni, you have a single source of truth for your market research “information” - bringing the data together, facilitating easy analysis, creating stories, and sharing “knowledge” all from one place. 

I am fascinated by the human conscious and passionate about certain aspects of philosophy that embrace psychoanalysis. For example, I could talk about Jung and the collective unconscious to no end. Yet findings from this very field suggest our attention spans are fleeting, so I will make this brief.

Information does not equal knowledge. Information is merely the data we feed our brain, and as with a computer, data must be processed if we want to gain insights. Our brains take in information, as a computer takes in data, and transform it into knowledge. As you read this sentence, your brain is converting data, i.e. words and phrases, into meaning. Here, it's happening again.

To explain this cognitive process, we can imagine a process that concatenates concepts, derives a context, and draws inferences. I am simplifying things, of course, but this schema essentially illustrates the process our brain undergoes to transform data (read: information) into knowledge.  

Conceptual representation and semantic context are part of the cognitive process that leads to knowledge. For the purposes of this article, we will define conceptual representation as the “concept” and semantic context as simply the “context,” which, when combined, give us information. But in order to gain knowledge, we also need an inferential process, i.e. a mechanism that is the building block of reasoning. An inference can be roughly defined as a logical conscious or unconscious concatenation of concepts, in a context, where the link between any two of those carry the informative element correlating the two concepts.

Let’s go further.

Concept

Few can effectively illustrate how our brain interprets a concept better than surrealist René Magritte, in his famous painting, The Treachery of Images, as seen at the top of this article. The picture of a pipe is ironically captioned in French, “This is not a pipe.” However, the purpose of the piece is to demonstrate these words are not ironic at all. What you are seeing when you look at that image is not actually a pipe, but the concept of a pipe. The shape, color, and texture lead our brain to understand that this image represents a pipe, but it’s not actually one.

I’ll give you another example. You’re not going to remember every word of this article, but my hope is when you walk away, you are going to be left with a few key takeaways—or concepts. You may not remember the first sentence, the title, or even my name, but your mind will remember the concepts of the brain, information and knowledge.

However, it is important to note that you cannot process any of this information without

Context

Context is what allows us to interpret the world around us, helping us aggregate the huge amounts of data coming at us all day, every day in the form of concepts.

Let’s refer back to the pipe. Imagine you are holding a pipe in your hand. What you have is still just a concept that, without context, is meaningless. The meaning the pipe carries for you is informed by additional concepts that are unique to your experiences. For example, the object might smell like tobacco, and remind you of your grandfather. Or it might make you think of a movie you watched as a child. Or your favorite surrealist painter.

Context is another form of data we feed our brain in our hunger to convert information into knowledge.

This leads us to

Inference

We now understand the concept of Magritte’s pipe and several different contexts it might live within. From here, we must correlate the concept through context to make an inference, or the formation of a unit of knowledge.

Picture a blank piece of paper with a pipe and your grandfather on it. Separately, these don’t tell us anything, but within the context of the smell of tobacco, these concepts are very much connected by how they are processed by your brain.

The nature of connection makes inference possible, without which you cannot gain knowledge. Knowledge is the byproduct of an inference, therefore it is the result of our mind processing the above equation over and over and over again.

You can have access to massive amounts of information, but without the above cognitive process, it will not make you any more knowledgeable. What if there was a way to capture every single piece of information in the universe and use augmented intelligence to extrapolate conceptual relationships and their context for each, effectively recreating our brains’ ability to transform information into knowledge?

This is what my company, Yewno is trying to achieve. We are on a mission to mimic certain conceptual representations that happen in our cognitive sphere to start to explain the universe, and we are getting closer every day.

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