Data and Information

Relationship between Data and Information

Examples of data include numbers, characters, images, or other method of recording. This data is normally input into a computer, stored and processed there.

Computers nearly always represent data in binary.

Data on its own has no meaning, only when interpreted by some kind of data processing system does it take on meaning and become information.

People or computers can find patterns in data to produce useful information. In a maths lesson you might be given the data: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. When you see the pattern between one number and the next as doubling you start to have useful information.

1234567.89 is data.

"Your bank balance has jumped 8087% to £1234567.89" is information.

"Nobody owes me that much money" is knowledge.

"I'd better talk to the bank before I spend it, because of what has happened to other people" is wisdom. But, sad to say, you do not need wisdom to pass your A’ level.

Data can be defined as an encoded form of information (eg ASCII) and as any form of communication that provides understandable and useful knowledge to the recipient.

So a stream of binary 1’s and 0’s, on it’s own means nothing. But if you are told that every 8 bits we start a new byte and that each byte represents a new binary number we have useful knowledge. Data needs a context before it becomes information. Information is often thought of as useful data.

Where does the data come from? Let us take an example. The Aricebo Radio telescope in Puerto Rico is continually monitoring the sky for radio signals. This is the raw, unprocessed data. The “Seti” (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program then sends this data to hundreds of thousands of PC’s around the world for processing. The PC’s are looking for patterns and, perhaps, see some pattern that could be interpreted as intelligent life. Information has been produced from the raw data.