Wisdom - the blurry top of human cognition in the DIKW-model?

Abstract

Wisdom is an ancient concept, that experiences a renaissance since the last century throughout several scientific communities. In each of them it is interpreted in rather different ways - from a key ability to succesful aging to a human peak perfomance transcending mere knowledge. As a result, miscellaneous definitions and models exist. There is for instance the DIKW-hierarchy that tempts to integrate the concept of wisdom into information science, still without providing a proper definition. The work at hand tries to sum up current approaches (out of computer science as well as others) with a focus on their usefulness for the positioning of wisdom atop the DIKW-model and the actual usefulness of the term for information science. At the end, with our characterization of wisdom as a fluctuating concept, we propose fuzzy sets to model wisdom as a scientific concept.