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170 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

and LIS as a community. This way, they may find that it is the community to blame after all. If this
is the case, a new iField in lieu of LIS is arguably void of legitimacy.

A discussion on the relationship between data and information
〇a*
YE Jiyuan〇, CHEN Ming, XIE Huan & HUA Weina
Data and Information are the basic concepts and terms of Library Science, Information Science
as well as Computer Science. With the advent of the Age of Big Data, Data has been widely used
not only in the professional fields but in lots of other fields, which made the relationship of the
two more complicated. Does the relationship belong to an equivalent relationship or an owner-
member relationship? If it is an owner-member relationship, is data larger or is information larger?
To clarify the relationship of the two from the interdisciplinary perspective has an important
significance for managing the data and information as resources, guiding the increasingly
rich information, big data practice, the education of library-information science students, and
information management science students and the discussion of the theory system of the whole
field of information.
In this article, based on the analysis of the connotation and extension of data and information in
the documents at home and abroad, the authors concluded four representative views as follows: the
scope of data is larger than that of information, the scope of information is larger than that of Data,
the scopes of data and information are the same, the scopes of data and the information are relative,
through the conceptual analysis method, historical method and comparative method. Among the
four views, the first that the scope of data is larger than that of information is the most popular
because of the dissemination of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid which
is observed and generalized from the angle of computer science. If we analyze the DIKW Pyramid
deeply, we will find its logic is not appropriate, and it can’t reflect the relationship among the data,
information, knowledge and wisdom. In the end, the authors put forward the view that the scope of
Information is larger than that of Data from four perspectives, which are philosophy, conventional
opinions, historical developments of the term of data and information, and related definitions in
the latest international organizations and governments’ documents. Information is divided into
ontological information and epistemological information. Epistemological information contains
data and non-data. The data can be divided into processing, meaningful data and temporarily
meaningless, raw data. In addition to explicit knowledge, there is tacit knowledge which cannot be
processed and is not meaningful. Wisdom, intelligence is also true. Therefore, it is not appropriate
to describe the logical relationship of information, data, knowledge, wisdom and intelligence in a
pyramid.

* Correspondence should be addressed to YE Jiyuan, Email: yejiyuan@nju.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-4232-8923