8.1 Reviewing databases

What is data?

Data is simply a collection of characters (that is, letters, numbers and symbols), which, on their own, have no particular meaning. For example, the letters:

Thissentencemakesnosense

don’t make much sense. They are just a series of letters. The numbers:

10052003

are just a series of numbers.

What is information?

When you do something to data – that is, process it – you convert it into information. Information is something that can be communicated and understood. For example, if we add spaces to the text above:

This sentence makes no sense.

we can understand what it means. If we add slashes to the numbers:

10/05/2003

we can recognise this as a date, possibly a birth date.