Data vs Information vs Knowledge

Most of the modern-day businesses rely on meaningful data patterns to provide useful information/insights which helps in building effective model solutions. Confusing data, information or knowledge for each other can have huge repercussions in later stages of model development. So, it is crucial to identify what constitutes data, what is information and how knowledge is to be developed, prior starting any data related modelling activity.

Data

Refers to any character, text, number, words, pixel information, which when not put into context, provide little to no information to a human. Data is usually raw, unorganized and unstructured in nature. So, for the data to make any sense it should be given some direction/structure. Let’s assume random set of number 24, 28, 22, 29, 33. These numbers by themselves do not convey or serve any utility.

Information

Once we take the data at hand and inspect, organize, and attach some context to go along with it, we get information. This structured data/information has the ability to provide the reader with insights and adds significance to the raw data. As with the above example, if I were to tell you that they are the measured daily max temperatures of Boston (in Celsius) in a particular weekday, we are able to make some analytical coherence with the information, which will help us make informed decisions.

Knowledge

Once we have the structured data-information with us, we use our past experiences (analytical, cognitive etc.) and evaluation/computation techniques to produce a framework for evaluating the information and data collected, in order to make it more nuanced. If I were to say, looking at the above values of the temperatures collected, it must have been collected during the summer season, this is knowledge. I was able to make a knowledgeable statement regarding the information at hand, because of my past heuristic/facts-based learnings.

To sum it up, data is unrefined/unstructured values, once this raw data is processed and analyzed we get refined/structured data which is referred to as information, finally, once this information is internalized by the human mind, we have knowledge regarding that information.

Hope this short article explains the subtle differences/connections of data, information and knowledge. Happy Learning!