Difference between data, information and knowledge?

What is the difference between data, information, and knowledge? Information and data are often used interchangeably, so does it even matter.

Actually it does. Social organisations have been built around one or the other of these concepts.. Datakind, or Human Rights Information and Documention Systems, or the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Eddie Halpin (chair of HURIDOCS and professor at Leeds Met), and he pointed me to the good old DIKW pyramid, which represents the flow between data, information, knowledge and wisdom, here is the version posted on Wikipedia:

So I had a go at adapting the DIKW model to the human rights context and the work of HURIDOCS and others:

Here we have a clear definition of information:

Information is data, that has been selected, organised, and presented in a way thats useful for a human rights purpose.

So this explains the angle of work we have at HURIDOCS: to help human rights organisations organise their information, so they can work effectively with it, leading them to knowledge and insight.

A good and simple example is this automated map from the website of the African Commission for Human Rights: it shows instantly which States are late on their periodical reports to this Commission (they are supposed to present a report every two years on the progress they have made in human rights):

This map shows clearly which States are late on their reporting.

This is an improvement on what the Commision had before… its the same data, but presented in a way that does not make it easy to get an overview:

Same data, but presented in a less useful way

Other examples of how data can be presented in useful ways? Thanks to post in comments below!