Abstract: With the rapid development of network technology and the boosting of new types of network applications, the amount of data in network is growing dramatically, which brings significant challenges to the Internet based on TCP/IP. In order to support the user access to the massive data, the information-centric networking (ICN) has been proposed and has become a hot research topic of the future Internet. In this paper, a data driven cognitive routing protocol in ICN is proposed. Each routing node has been endowed the following cognitive behaviors: perception, inquiry, learning, reasoning and feedback. It gets the information about its local topology, the information about its processed routing requests and the popular contents by perception. It builds the neighbor caching table by inquiry. It remembers the information about the experienced path by learning. It analyzes the relationship among nodes with the friend caching table built by reasoning. It makes routing decisions based on guidance by feedback. Simulation results have shown that the proposed protocol is feasible and effective with good performance.