Data and Information

           I have been studying information technology for 3 years and a half. Every year when the new semester, the new class had started, I noticed that there is one question teachers usually ask students. The question is “What is data and information?” , “Can we clarify the differences?”. 
            Like the students in the other class, we were asked the same thing. When we heard the questions, the class was so silence feeling like we were settling down and thinking about it. About a minute later my classmate started answering the questions. Some said that data and information are two different things, but when my teacher asked how different it was. His answer is the mixing of words which no one can understand. I found it a little bit funny when I looked at my teacher’s face. Some answer that information and data are the same things. It is different in just the term of speaking and writing. Now the laughing is from my teacher and so did everybody. She didn’t say which answer is right or wrong yet, but obviously we all knew that they were wrong.

            The class was a bit noisy because everyone had started the discussion. She tabbed the table to get the attention and said thank for all the answer, and then she gave us one indirect definition of “data and information”. She said: “Data is a piece of beef, and information is a cooked beef on a plat”.

            Everyone was laughing and so did I, but along with that I was thinking. I think I got something from her speech but I just couldn’t manage the right sentence to answer. She went on and explained herself. She said data and information is like fish and water. We cannot say which one is important or which one is less important. She started to give the real definition. She said all data were raw information which had not been processed by people or machine yet. Like the beef that hasn’t been cooked. We were asking why, and she said if just looked at the data that we collected, we couldn’t understand what it is about till we had processed it. She added that processing here means, counting, retrieving, and selecting one particular thing that we want from the big amount of data. Usually these kind of processing now a day are processed by computer software. For example, we wanted to know about the average of family member in one location. The first thing to do is collecting data from each family in that location. Later on is counting and do the math of all the data, and after all we will get the result and that is what we call “Information”, the clear data that we can understand, and it provides us knowledge to reach a decision. Like the cooked beef on the plat that is ready to serve. I was cleared about “Data and Information” since that time. I think it is really logical and clear definition from my teacher.

Written by: Donal-ly .