Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

Data, information, and knowledge

Data is facts of the world. Data represents a fact or statement of an event without relation to other things. Data comes in many forms, such as web pages, sensors, devices, audio, video, networks, log files, social media, transactional applications, and much more. Most of these data are generated in real time and on a very large-scale. Although it is generally alphanumeric (text, numbers, and symbols), it can consist of images or sound. Data consists of raw facts and figures. It does not have any meaning until it is processed. For example, financial transactions, age, temperature, and the number of steps from my house to my office are simply numbers. The information appears when we work with those numbers and ...