[Sigia-l] data as information?

[Michael Albers]

Context is often very specific, which can help stuff shift from data to 
information. The more complex the problem, the more context-specific is the 
information; slight shifts in context can radically change the proper 
interpretation. A problem with many software designs is the attitude of 
"I'm not sure how they use it, so I'll give them everything and let them 
sort it out."  In other words, context is hard, so we'll ignore that issue.

In a previous job, I constantly railed against a screen in the customer 
service program.  In this context, an order was a single roll of film 
processed at one our plants.   Once a 6 digit order number was typed in, 
all the order information appeared (dealer, date, price schedule, 
etc).  Now for the data dump.  Each order type (24 exposure, double prints) 
had a bunch of different prices depending on specials, etc.  ALL of that 
pricing information appeared on the screen; the poor customer service 
person could not easily tell which had been used to price the order.

 From the programmer/data designer view, the data had been properly 
retrieved from the database and was formatted correctly.  Therefore, not a 
design issue.

 From the customer service view, there was a pile of hard to read pricing 
data that required lots of mental effort to even figure out which one was 
used, much less if the proper one was used for pricing.

Mike Albers


>Data is fundamentally useless without context. It's not even worth
>talking about. So all data can be assumed to have enough context to be
>meaningful, so it has enough context to be treated as information.
> >From a data perspective, a document is a collection of terms and
>phrases organized into a hierachical and linear structure. Microsoft
>Word looks at documents that way; so does Google. People don't. And
>that is the distinction with which we, as IAs, are concerned. To us, a
>document is much more than Title, Author, and BodyText fields.


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Dr. Michael J. Albers
Professional Writing Program
Department of English
University of Memphis
Memphis  TN  38152