Quality and Data Base Management

Quality and Data Base Management

This short essay attempts to distinguish between sometimes very similar words and at other times surprisingly different. The information technology age that we are all a part of today has been the reason for the ironically different definitions for these words that in the past may have been all examples of one another in any thesaurus. The words the report focuses on are data, information, and knowledge. Therefore, the work will attempt to describe the differences and also to help in the clarification will provide examples of each.

Before the technology revolution that became so prominent in our lives, the word data was run of the mill. It was a word that was more often used in science and meant to gather a body of facts. However, since technological change spurred the computer, data has a whole new appeal in the English language. For example, in computing, data is basically some sorted or unsorted sequences of stuff that can be translated by computer processing. Because computers speak in the binary language, data can be considered to be information that is in a digital form. An example of data could be a series of numbers that would have no meaning unless sorted or presented in a certain way. Consider 123456 as data.

Information on the other hand is a stimulus that some second party can extract and interpret a meaning. Of course, this meaning could be in any context. In the sense of computing, information can be entered and stored on disks such as floppies, hard disks, etc. In a raw form, information may not have any meaning and therefore may actually be more accurately seen as data. Once the data is formatted into a readable or understandable format it may then be known as information. Thus, if data is in a computer and then it is formatted or processed, the out put may be considered information. Consider from the previous data example, $1,234.56 would be translated data or useable information.