Principles of Data Management

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFORMATION AND DATA

Wisdom, knowledge, information and data are all closely related through being on the same continuum – from wisdom, to knowledge, then to information and, finally, to data. This book is about managing data to provide useful information, so we will concentrate on the relationship between information and data.

An often-heard definition of information is that it is ‘data placed in context’. This implies that some information is the result of the translation of some data using some processing activity, and some communication protocol, into an agreed format that is identifiable to the user. In other words, if data has some meaning attributed to it, it becomes information.

For example, what do the figures ...