Data and Information

selective in arrangeion INFORMATION 123424331911 Your gentle lottery ticket lean 140593 Your get wind of birth Aaabbbccd The grades you unavoid suitableness in your GCSEs entropy and randomness selective breeding, breeding & k immediatelyledge education Data consist of raw facts and figures it does non excite any thinking until it is processed and morose into almost topic serviceable. It comes in more forms, the main atomic number 53s creation letters, rime, understands, symbols and sound. It is essential that selective information is on hand(predicate) beca subprogram it is the graduation step in creating signifying(prenominal) information.Ex 123424331911 140593 aaabbbccd, tycoon not mean anything by themselves, plainly if it is processed and turned into (the chart below) they turn into something useful. Information Information is information that has beenprocessedin such a focussing as to bemeaningfulto the person who receives it. INFORMATION = DATA + scene + MEANING INFORMATION = DATA + background + MEANING Example of information DATA 21041926 This has no meaning or linguistic con text edition CONTEXT It is a British mesh This entirelyows us to register it as twenty-first April 1926.It still has no meaning and is and thence not information MEANING The give birth age of Queen Elizabeth II This gives regular army ll the elements required dor it to be called information fellowship Knowledge is the ability of unders burn markding the consanguinity between pieces of information and what to actually do with the information. Consider this scenarioPerson puts a figure into in truth baking water. Data self-possessed Finger nerves sends pain information to the brain. ProcessingBrain gets the entropy and comes up with Information Painful finger authority it is not in a ripe(p) place.Action Brain enumerates finger to remove itself from hot water. Knowledge Sticking finger in hot water is a severity approximatio n. Knowledge is having an considering of the rules Types of entropy Data tidy sum be interjectd in galore(postnominal) an(prenominal) different formats called information fictitious characters. When setting up a selective informationbase or spreadsheet, it is important that the jell selective information case is selected for each content. This is because the information pillowcase bequeath de landmarkine what throw out be d bingle with the entropy held in that field e. g. sorting, peeping, calculations and so forth It also shadow determine the format in which entropy is debunked e. g. fitting/ condemnation information font de office staff allow you to pick the format of your choice, 14/05/08, 14 May 2008, fourteenth May 2008 etc. Finally, some entropy causas ar able to automatically corroborate the information being placeed. e. g. When you use a date/ sentence entropy grammatical case then each date give be automatically breaked to put on c atomic number 18 that it prat actually exist. For trial eatple, you would not be able to register the date 31/02/2008 it would automatically be rejected or return an dislocate message. Types of info * text edition * subject * Boolean * Date/ clip * Image Text A text data oddball tramp devote any letter, number, symbol or punctuation mark.It is sometimes referred to as alphanumeric or string. The data smoke be pure text or a combination of text, numbers pool and symbols. * Name Joe Bloggs * Address 101, any driveway That Town TR34 9RT * Telephone Number 01234 567890 * gondola car Registration EA05 NXR * Car ColourBlue Telephone numbers pauperization to be break ind as a text/string data image because they often begin with a 0 and if they were memoryd as an integer then the atomic number 82 zero would be discounted. You be never plausibly to indirect request to add or multiply telephone numbers so there is no reason to inventory it as an integer data type. Number A number data type contains numbers.Example * Weight in Kg12. 25, 19. 99, 199. 99 * agency measurement in metres14. 5 * Temperature ( tips Celsius)37. 5 Types of numbers * Integers An integer stores whole numbers, any positive or negative. Integers however bumnot store numbers with decimal places. * Real Your quantitative data energy hold to be formatted with decimal places. This means it dissolvenot be stored as an integer number. Instead it is known as arealnumber. You can specify the number of decimal places that you engage. * Currency When you cull to format numerical data as currentness then it provide automatically be presumptuousness devil decimal places.However, you can choose to format currency with 0 dp because in some caboodle it would not be appropriate to display the pence. Think of an state agent, they might give a hearth for ? 295,000. It would intuitive feeling barmy displayed as ? 295,000. 00. The currency data type also allows you to display the clear currency symbol such as ? or $. Boolean Boolean data holds one of two values, for mannikin * Yes/no * squargon/false * 0/1 A Boolean data type is apply to answer questions where there argon only two options, three options would mean it was no longer boolean data.Examples of questions where the responses would be stored as boolean data * Has the heating been turned on? Yes / No * Are you employ? Yes / No Data / Time A date / time data type is used to store any data that is related to date or time. The tricksy thing round date / time is that there are so many ways of showing it. And some countries get subdue a different way of representing a date. For example * 9/4/94 in the USA means quaternary Sept 94 * 9/4/94 in the UK means 9th April 94 By using a date /time data type, you can choose the format for how you requirement your data to be automatically displayed.For example 14/05/08, 14 May 2008, 14th May 2008 etc. An separate reason to use a date /time data type i s that it can provide some fundamental organization on the data being entered. For example, you would not be able to enter the date 31/02/2008 it would automatically be rejected or return an error message. Image Databases allow graphical images such as photographs to be stored as a data type. Images are binary files or else than text or numbers which is why a specific data type is required. Different file types such as . bmp, . jpg, . tiff can be storedQuality of information Things that meet the quality of information trueness If the data that you take hold collected is outside then the information it forget micturate allow inevitably also be in immaculate. Examples of how innacurate data occurs Questionnaries and surveys * questions might be indisposed worded so that users misunderstand them * there whitethorn not cave in been large nation interviewed for any conclusions to be reliable. For example, asking hardly two populate is not correspondingly to be enough Hu man mistakes * if people are collecting the data manually e. g. ecording answers to questionnaires, writing down instrument measurements, they might practise a mistake. Calibration of instruments * if data is being collected automatically by sensors or other instruments then the results could be in ideal if the instruments were not correctly gradational at the start of the data collection period Examples of information which would be of atomic use if it was inaccurate Weather annunciates some(prenominal) people duty tour the weather foreshadow each day so that they can get an judgment of what to wear. People commit to stick faith that the aim will be reasonably accurate in enact to comprise decisions.Supermarket damages When you go to a shop you probably know how oft money you have to go past. You chek the prices of things you are purchase on the shelves and will have an idea of how more than it will cost by the time you have reached the till. If the peson entrance way the price fragmentizeicular propositions into the system has accidentally oerprice a couple of items, then this could mean that you dont have enough money to pay for shopping and have to put something back. melodyes Businesses have to keep accurate records of all the money coming in and all of the money being paid out.If the accountants invite a mistake and dont accurately entera ll of the money received then it could emotional state corresponding the club has not do as overmuch profit that year. Or they havent recorded all the bills so it fillms that the company is making more money tan it really is Relevance In nightspot for information to be useful it must(prenominal) be germane(predicate) to you. School You have a great deal of information to learn for each of your exams. Each time you go to lessons you probably take a lot of notes and perhaps are given handouts by your instructors to read.What close to if your teachers decided to spend a few workweeks teach ing you about things that shareicularly kindle them? What they had taught you might have been really evoke to both them and you plainly it isnt relevant to what you holded at the time. You would rule that you had spent a few truly precious weeks learning about things that you didnt need to know in order to expand your exam. Weather forecasts Whilst it might be interesting to find out what the weather is like in Florida or Melbourne today, it isnt really relevant to your e trulyday life.It wont help you decide whether you need to take an umbrella with you before you take into account home in the UK. pertains appointments You might be feeling ailing and want to make an appointment to suck up your doctor. You phone up the local surgery to find out when the doctor has a spare appointment time. It wouldnt be very(prenominal) useful or relevant to you if the receptionist told you how many appointment times were usable to see the nurse. mark prices Perhaps your parents migh t be thinking of moving house. The first thing they would do would be to speak to an earth agent to find out how much their house was worth(predicate).It wouldnt be useful or relevant if the estate agent were to tell them how a similar house in a different part of the demesne might be worth. Up to date information In order to be useful, information involve to be up to date. In many cases information changes over time and so old or out of date information can be misleading or atomic number 23 you the wrong picture of what is happening. Exams As part of your revision, you have a go at practicing lots of exam questions before the oversize day and you work your way by means of the practice papers and pretence answers that your teacher has given you.However, some of the papers are over five years old. How useful are the model answers for questions such as which remembering device would you recommend? and what is the second-rate size of a hard plow? It is well known that thin gs move very quickly in the world of ICT and hardware and software changes rapidly. What was a top-notch computer sightly three years ago is now probably a very low-spec machine. So the model answers are likely to be out-of-date. Holidays Choosing a holiday can be great fun. And you would probably go to the run short agent to get the latest brochures. why?Well, because if you used last years brochures the holiday may not even be available any more. And certainly the prices would be different. So you need up-to-date information House prices Your parents are still thinking of interchange their house. They need an idea of how much their house is worth right now. It would be no use to them being told by the estate agent how much their house was worth five years ago. Completeness In order for information to be useful it needs to be complete. If part of the information is absent then you will not be able to make use of it or make accurate decisions.Exams Remember those exam papers th at you were doing for revision during your study appropriate? Your teacher wanted you to work your way through them and check your answers against the model answers. What if you were only given the second half of the model answer and the first half was abstracted? How useful would it be to you? Weather forecast You still want to plan the family zephyr for tomorrow. However when you check the weather forecast you are only told what the weather in the morning will be like. on that point is vigour about the afternoon.You cant really make a decision just base upon what the morning weather is likely to be. Doctors appointment Imagine you are feeling ill and you need to make an appointment to see your doctor. How useful would it be if the receptionist just told you that you could have an appointment at quarter past two? Does she mean today, tomorrow or next week? The information in incomplete. Quality of monstrance Information which is presented in a disorganise way or in a manner that is hard to understand will be less useful to you Business dataIf you were asked to present some information in a business meeting. It is often break off to present it graphically. People find it very hard to spot patterns in a table of data, tho the same information presented as a graph makes it very idle. Buying a house Your parents want to buy a new house. It is much easier to pick a house if a photograph was available. Your parents can see promptly if the house would appeal to them and whether they would be interested in finding out more. once they have decided they like the look of the house they would then want more perioded indite information.However, giving them the written information first with no idea of what the house looks like would make it knotty for them to get an idea as to whether they would like it. Too mucho or too litle feature For information to be useful you need the right amout of detail. There is a danger of having too much detail which makes t he information overwhelming and difficult to extract the bits that you want to know about. Or there might not be enough detail in which case you wont understand the safe picture. Example baking a cake Too much detail non enough detailIngredients Not only telling you that you need fluor, but telling you all of the different brands of fluor and how the choice of each one would affect the rising of your cake Ingredients Telling you that you need fluor but not the sum of money you will need to weigh ouy MethodTelling you just how many times you need to shake up the eggs and for exatly how many seconds you need to flexion in the fluor MethodTelling you to mix the ingredients together but not informing you of the correct order in which to combine them CookingTelling you the tiny amount of minutes that the cake should be baked for every type of oven that is soon for sale CookingTelling you the temperatura to cook the cake but not how long to leave it in the oven for Coding of data When you are conniving a database system to hold data, one of the first decisions that you will need to make is about how the data will be collected and stored. You already know the term GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out).If you collect data and enter it into the system without careful good will at the planning stage then the output from your system will be of weensy use. One of the things that you can consider is to legislation some or all of your data in order to rectify the efficiency of your system. What is cryptograph of data? Any system will need to have data collected, entered and stored. One method of storing data is to assign labels to it. This usually means shorten the original data in an concord manner. The agreement is between the users of the system. This coding avoidance could be part of the training of how to use the system, and it could also be documented at bottom the system for new users.If the coding is altogether obvious then there is no such need for forma l documentation. For example if a field called Gender has only two values M and F. It should be obvious from the field name that this refers to Male and Female. Example 1 real data Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Coded data Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Example 2 Original data Xtra Large Large forte Small Coded data XL L M S Example 3 The above economys are fairly easy for anyone to recognise and understand. Some codes however are more complicated. What do you think the undermentioned codes might represent? RG935LR CV183TP The above examples could be postcodes.They represent a street name, a particular part of the street and the townspeople where the street is located. Example 4 How about SK12BN TR14GN These might be a little bit more difficult because the code is made up from different vocalization parts. Lets have a closer look. The first part represents a piece of clothing, so SK be Skirt and TR represented Trousers The middle part of the code was the dress size. The fina l part of the code represented a colour, so BN represented Brown and GN represented Green. You should be able to see from that information that the first code is a size 12 browned skirt. What piece of clothing would the second code represent? Why might we want to code data?Much of the data that we collected and enter into our systems has some degree of repetition. Speeding up data ingress Lets take the example of collecting data about a persons gender. People can be either Male or Female. Whilst these two options are easily understood by all, imagine having to enter the word Male and Female into a system many hundreds of times sort of. It is a waste of time and effort because no extra information is contained in the full words compared to a single letter. addition accuracy of data entry The other issue is that no matter how accurate a person is at data entry, at some stage they are likely to make a mistake and might spell Male as Mail or Female as Femal.This type of mistake will make any results from your database queries unreliable. Instead of entranceway Male or Female you could code the data and instead enter it as M or F. just now having to enter one letter instead of a possible six will speed up data entry. It will also cut down on the risk of mistakes being made with spelling. drill of validation In our example, the words Male or Female have been coded so that they become M or F. When data has been coded it makes it easier to use validation to check if the data entered is sensible. With the example above, the person entering the data could still make a mistake and enter S instead of M or F.But if you set up validation so that the field will only learn the letters M or F and absolutely nothing else then that should further cut down on possible mistakes. Note that validation can only check if the data is sensible and within reasonable limits, it cannot check whether the data is accurate. Somebody could still enter F instead of M. Less storage home required Every letter that you store in your database system will take at least one byte of storage. If you store Female as F then you will cede five bytes of storage space. If the system belongs to a large organisation, there might be many thousands or millions of records stored simply by coding one field, a great amount of hard disk storage can be saved. Faster searching for dataIt stands to reason that the smaller the size of your database, the blistering it will be to search and maturate results. Thus by coding data and keeping the size of the system to a minimum the more time you can save in the long run when running queries. Coding examples In our everyday lives we come across many examples of how coding is used to represent data. Here are just a few more ideas Country names The name of a country can be represented by two letters. For example corking Britain GB France FR Canada CA Problems caused by coding data Whilst coding data can bring many benefits it can also l ead to some problems. Coarsening of data This means that during the coding process some of the subtle details in the data are lost. Look at the image below