WaaS: Wisdom as a service

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 of Things, Web of Things, Big Data, and other research fields have provided just such an open system architecture with resource sharing and services. The next step is to develop an open and interoperable content architecture with intelligent sharing and services for the organization and transformation in the data, information, knowledge, and wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. This article introduces wisdom as a service (WaaS), a content architecture based on the pay-as-you-go IT trend. The WaaS infrastructure and the main challenges in WaaS research and applications are discussed. A case study is also described. Relying on cloud computing 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.