Data Science 101: Data vs. Information vs. Knowledge
We talk about big data quite often these days, wanted to put some fundas about basics around data. Do you know the singular form of data ? How data differs from information vs. knowledge? How insights convert to actions? Here is my attempt towards answering some of these.
Data is often raw in binary represented as a number or a character or a string. Data is a plural version of datum. Information is anything which puts context to data. For example: The number 89 itself doesn’t mean anything unless we fit a context to say – the car’s speed is 89 kmph. Knowledge on other hand is about knowing how things around us work & the larger world is interconnected. It is obtained based on experiences, experiment, research, etc. In the below infographic I have tried to explain these terms using a simplified version of intelligence that can be embedded in cars. More on the infographic follows.
I have tried to take a very simplified version here. Now just imagine, when we talk about intelligent cars – we are usually talking about 100s of such parameters instead of just a single varaible (speed of car) ,all collected from multiple sensors obtained in realtime streaming format to make such decisions. Knowledge is obtained through predictive algorithms which continuously learns [in AI terms to say “adapts”] from data and help in making recommendation about safety of the vehicle. Now imagine these 100s of parameters collected every millisecond from 1000s of connected cars around you – this is what forms “Big Data”.
Hope you liked this post, I will be writing up more articles – as have been getting requests from friends around the globe. Stay tuned !
NLP 2.0 