Knowledge-Based Policing: Augmenting Reality with Respect for Privacy - Discrimination and Privacy in the Information Society - page 168

Before we illustrate how policing practice can benefit from products such as
augmented reality that prescribe contextual actions (complementing the existing
products that confine themselves to descriptions of the outer world), one should
notice that the epistemological basis of the NIM and ILP, and thus, these products,
is highly positivistic. From a positivist perspective, data, information, knowledge,
and intelligence are treated as objects that can be obtained, recorded, enriched,
analyzed, and disseminated. Moreover, the positivist line of reasoning is that (digi-
tal) data is the start of a chain from data to information to knowledge to actionable
knowledge (intelligence) (Carter 2004; Kop and Klerks 2009; Ratcliffe 2008a;
Williamson 2008). This data-driven logic can easily be reversed to a knowledge-
driven logic. Indeed, knowledge must exist before information needs can be ar-
ticulated, after which data can be collected, structured, and analyzed (Tuomi
1999). Both forms of logic, however, treat data, information, knowledge, and in-
telligence as concrete classes of objects, which after forming are little affected by
context, personal interpretations, the social negotiation of meaning, or time. In the
resulting mechanistic view attention is lop-sided to processing explicated, decon-
textualized, and encoded data. In practice this comes at the cost of losing the so-
cial richness of 'soft' knowledge (implicit and tacit forms of knowledge) (Innes et
al. 2005). This negatively affects what information should be about: inform action.
As we consider a positivist perspective on data, information, knowledge, and intel-
ligence a too limitative foundation for creating augmented realities, we propose to
reorient these key-concepts from an interpretive-constructivist epistemological
perspective.
9.2.2 Reorienting Data, Information, Knowledge,
and Intelligence
In this section we make an attempt to describe the ILP key-concepts from an in-
terpretive-constructivist perspective. The descriptions should be viewed as ideal-
types in a Weberian sense. Hence, a real-world instance will often represent a
combination of these ideal types.
Data
Based on ones interests one may decide to encode signals by using e.g. text, sound
recordings, photographs, films, or models. Although these artifacts may serve dif-
ferent purposes (e.g. art), within the context of KBP they represent data. Thus,
data are intentionally created and structured representations (or abstractions) of re-
ality as we observe it. As perspective, methods and means used in the process of
creating the data are related to an idiosyncratic purpose, the abstractions may or
may not be useful for other purposes, or within other contexts. For example, a
police register of Police Reports may be used to study criminal patterns (or gener-
alizations). The design of the data collection, however, would have been quite dif-
ferent if it had had that purpose from the start. Moreover, it should be noted that
data is dynamic as it may be deleted or become illegible, as keys, formats, or car-
riers get lost, obsolete, or damaged.