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/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 of WaaS. 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.