[Sigia-l] RE: Data vs. Information

[Thomas Vander Wal]

Ziya --

It is data if I do not know what DELL or HP are (these are data points 
that I do maintain).  It is also data points if I do not know these are 
stock quotes.  These are just data points with out knowing their 
previous data points or their Earnings per share or other data that help 
provide understanding of the data.  These data points need context, 
which is provided by other data then forming information.

You have informed me (an action of sharing data and/or information) of 
these data points.  You gave me another data point by saying these are 
stock quotes, which helps give understanding to the names and the dollar 
amounts (stock prices are officially not dollar amounts but points) and 
not DELL and HP's price for a computer mouse.  You also provided this 
data was from today at a specific time.

The formation of all these data points may be *information* to me or may 
still remain data points.  As it is with many things when dealing with 
information and users, it depends.  If I were looking for a strike price 
  for DELL and HP this would be information to me.  If I were trying to 
decipher trends these would be specific data points with valuable 
assistive data that help me qualify this data.  The quality of these 
data points is valuable to me as it provides assistive data that helps 
provide context.

This gets us back to understanding the user and the how the user is 
going to use data or information.  When structuring information we must 
understand the user so that we are not providing meaningless data when 
we intend to provide information.  Information Architecture provides 
structure to data and information providing greater value to the data 
(to shape it into information) or information (by making the information 
finable and/or providing supporting data and information that help form 
more usable information for the user.

If your DELL and HP quotes came with links to historical data, or were 
links to further data or information these elements could be information.

ATB,
Thomas

www.vanderwal.net

Listera wrote:
"Thomas Vander Wal" wrote:


Data alone is not information, but a collection of data points do create
information.


These were the prices for two stocks at about 3 PM today:

DELL $28.54 HP $27.28

Is this data or information, to you?

Best,

Ziya