[Year 12 IPM] Data vs Information

[Mike Brookes]

Ah the joys of what happens when words get hijacked :-)

Once upon a time information was knowledge/understanding/ideas possessed 
  by a person. Since telepathy has not proved to be reliable method of 
exchanging information between people it was necessary to represent this 
information in a form that could be transmitted from one person to 
another - Data. For example I have some information about the difference 
between data and information. To pass this information to you I try to 
represent it using English words (data) and transmit it to you. The 
actual form of the data may change during the transmission process. eg. 
from words to ascii code to binary and back. When you read the words on 
your screen you will hopefully understand what I am writing and have 
gained some information.  The quality of the "conversion to 
data"/transmission/"decoding of data"  process can be measured by how 
close your understanding/information corresponds to mine.

Only people can process information - computers only process data - the 
most elegant of charts/graphs convey no information whatsoever to a 
blind person. The single piece of data "car" can provide information to 
anyone who can read English. Even more so if they knew that this was the 
answer to the question "How are we going to get to the shopping centre 
at lunchtime?"

Then the IT people came along and hijacked the words "information" and 
"data" so that they could use the term Information Technology when 
referring to a system that only processes data.

They said that Data was raw facts - being carefull not to define exactly 
what a raw fact is.

They said that Information was data that had been processed to make it 
more usefull - being carefull not to state how anyone could understand 
anything from a carefully sorted and summarised list stored on a file 
server.

Mike Brookes
Chief cook and bottlewasher - Copperfield College
(Confusionism is our favourite religion)


murch at tpg.com.au wrote:
> Is someone able to give me a succint definition of each and hence the distinct difference between the two.  
> This is a source of strong debate in another study method.  Email me direct if you do not want to clutter up 
> the list.  Thanks in advance
> Anne Mirtschin
> Hawkesdale p12 College
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