Sapient structures for sapient control

The control of autonomous systems requires provision of at least a synthetic form of intelligence or sapience. While descriptions of these are common, there is no current model which relates their definitions to the structure of an information processing system. We have constructed a self-consistent birational general model of a hierarchical system, and associated data, information, understanding and sapience with aspects of its constitution. We describe the general hierarchical model and its characteristics relevant to sapient control. We associate data with single scalar levels of the hierarchy, information with birational level pairs, understanding with the integration of three adjacent levels, and sapience with the overall integration of the entire system.