The Relationship Between Data And Information


The relationship between data and information is an interconnected one. Data is raw facts such as phone numbers or addresses, and information is the organization of these raw facts into a meaningful manner.

The information may be well organized on a report or table and yet not always be meaningful to all people. There are different ways to arrange data to make it meaningful for different people. For example, one person might be satisfied with information that shows him or her the towns in which their customers live in to help him or her determine where the largest volume of customers are. A different person might want that information expanded to include those customers street addresses as well so that they may determine a better shipping route. Both of these examples contain the same customers and similar data but the first person would have no use for the street addresses in his search and the second person would not have enough information to create a shipping route from just the towns.

The type of data used can also affect the information generated. You can gather a great deal of data on the needs of plants to grow but if you do not put the data in the table correctly or put inaccurate data in you will get information that is basically useless. That is the garbage in/ garbage out theory. It is also a good idea when creating a table to group the like characteristics together to make it easier to gather information from the data. Computers now make it easier to input data into tables in a meaningful manner to create information that might be useful to someone.

It is now easier to manipulate data and examine it in many different ways from many different points of view quickly. It is in man’s nature to gather data and group things together according to similar data to generate information that is useful for what they are doing. An example would be similar to one show in the study guide. An employer is looking for an employee that lives in the Trenton area and speaks Spanish. The older way to find this information was to look through each record and look for the pertinent data that they are looking for. Then they went to card readers, which was faster but still time consuming. The employer would input all the employee’s cards into a reader and set it to look for those with the right criteria. The card reader would then generate information from the data that the employer needs. The computer however is much more efficient. Provided that all information was put into the computer correctly, the employer can now ask the computer