Data and Information

Data is a raw and unorganized facts that have no meaning attached to them.
Generally, data comprises facts, observations, perceptions numbers, characters,
symbols, image, etc.

Data is always interpreted, by a human or machine, to derive meaning. So, data is

meaningless. Data contains numbers, statements, and characters in a raw form.

Eg: 10, 12, a, 1990, 0110110

Information is data that has meaning attached to it.

Information is a set of data which is processed in a meaningful way. Information is

processed, structured, or presented in a given context to make it meaningful and
useful.

Information is processed data which includes data that possess context,

relevance, and purpose. It also involves manipulation of raw data.

Differences between Data and Information

 Data is a raw and unorganized fact that has no meaning attached to it whereas
Information is a set of data that has meaning attached to it.

 Data does not have any specific purpose whereas Information carries a meaning
that has been assigned by interpreting data.

 Data alone has no significance while Information is significant by itself.

 Data never depends on Information while Information is dependent on Data.

Primary Data Collection

Primary data sources include information collected and processed directly by the
researcher, such as observations, surveys, interviews, readings from sensors and
focus groups. This means that this form of data has not been previously generated.

This is usually broken into two groups:

 Data collected directly from a sensor or instrument This is data can be

measured. For example, times taken for runners to complete a race, humidity,
wind speed etc.

 Data collected by observation from people or organizations. For example, data

collected from a police officer at the scene of an accident, data collected from
finance officers used to calculate land and building taxes.

Secondary Data Collection

As opposed to primary data, secondary data is that which already exists at the time
of research. The researcher does not have to generate it themselves, but rather,
can simply collate or analyze data which has already been collected from pre-
existing sources such as research articles, Internet or library searches, etc.
Secondary data sources must be reliable, accurate and without bias.
 Document Types
A document is used to collect, store and share data. Documents can be either
hardcopy or softcopy.

Hardcopy documents are physical documents that are written or printed.

Softcopy documents are digital copies of a document that are created and stored
on a digital storage device.

Turnaround Document
A turnaround document is a document which has some information printed onto
it by a computer then has more information added to it by a human and finally it is
fed back into a computer to transfer the added information into the computer.

Optical mark recognition and optical character recognition are often used in a
turnaround document.

For example, in a car factory a quality check document can be printed, and the
worker fills it out by shading different options for each check on the car. The
document is then scanned by the computer and an OMR reads the selected data
and stores it on the system. Often other machine- readable data such as barcodes
are used for the computer to get additional information for example which exact car
it is etc.

Human-Readable Document
A human-readable document can be directly read and understood by a human
but may not be able to be used directly as input for a computer.

For example, a user hand writes information on a piece of paper. A computer

cannot directly or automatically read the data on the paper or use it as input
however another human can read the information on the paper.
Machine-Readable Document
A machine-readable document can be automatically or directly read by a
computer system and understood but may not necessarily be readable by
humans.

For example, barcodes and QR codes are easily machine readable but not
easily read by humans.

Some documents can be both human readable as well as machine readable if

portions are meant to be understood by machines and other parts read by
machine.

For example, a cheque that has words and images printed on it for humans to
read as well as data printed in magnetic ink for a MICR to read.