WaaS—Wisdom as a Service

Abstract

An emerging hyper-world encompasses all human activities in a social-cyber-physical space. Its power derives from the Wisdom Web of Things (W2T) cycle, namely, ``from things to data, information, knowledge, wisdom, services, humans, and then back to things.{''} The W2T cycle leads to a harmonious symbiosis among humans, computers and things, which can be constructed by large-scale converging of intelligent information technology applications with an open and interoperable architecture. The recent advances in cloud computing, the Internet/ Web of Things, big data and other research fields have provided just such an open system architecture with resource sharing/services. The next step is therefore to develop an open and interoperable content architecture with intelligence sharing/services for the organization and transformation in the ``data, information, knowledge and wisdom (DIKW){''} hierarchy. This chapter introduces Wisdom as a Service (WaaS) as a content architecture based on the ``paying only for what you use{''} IT business trend. The WaaS infrastructure, WaaS economics, and the main challenges in WaaS research and applications are discussed. A case study is described to demonstrate the usefulness and significance ofWaaS. Relying on the clouds (cloud computing), things (Internet of Things) and big data, WaaS provides a practical approach to realize the W2T cycle in the hyper-world for the coming age of ubiquitous intelligent IT applications.