The hierarchy of wisdom

Georgina Swan

Georgina Swan, former Editor of CIO.

Imagine taking on a project of the scale of the Square Kilometre Array — the world’s biggest radio telescope.

Let’s run through a few statistics. The SKA project, as it is called, involves the construction of a radio telescope 50 times larger than any other. It includes some 3000 antennae across about 5500 kilometres in Australia and New Zealand, each of which will send data to a central supercomputer about 100 times faster than Japan’s ‘K Computer’ — currently considered the most powerful computational behemoth around.

Any day now, the Australasian SKA Industry Consortium is likely to find out whether Australia and New Zealand will host the global facility. The countries are shortlisted along with Southern Africa.

Regardless of the decision, the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) will continue with the construction of the associated project, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, a new radio telescope currently being built at the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory in the mid-west region of Western Australia. The team has already used a supercomputer at the new iVEC Pawsey Centre in Perth to simulate how data will be processed to create images of the ‘radio sky’.

What does all this have to do with CIOs? The understanding that comes from the SKA project will influence information technology in Australia for years ahead. Not just from a project management perspective, although that’s impressive enough in its own right. It will influence data processing, transmission, storage and access — and turning that information into knowledge. As Dr Brian Boyle, who leads the SKA program says, it’s like drinking from a data fire hydrant. He likes to quote T.S. Elliott’s Choruses From The Rock:

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Unwittingly or otherwise, Elliott penned in this poem what is often referred to as, among other things, the wisdom hierarchy; the assumption that information is typically defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge.

Which brings us back to the SKA project. Australia is poised to spearhead a knowledge data pipeline that has implications for astronomy, climate, energy and sustainability. In the long term, enterprise IT can only reap the benefits.

Tags: square kilometre array, CSIRO, supercomputers, SKA, Dr Brian Boyle, astronomy, ASKAP