Information is not data

The words, information and data, are used interchangeably in many contexts. This may lead to their confusion. However, they are not synonyms.

Often data is defined as raw facts while information is processed data. Another distinction that is made is that information is the things that we know and data is the representation of the information. As an example, we may be thinking about a favorite niece's age, who is four. We would tend to represent that with Arabic numerals (4), but we could represent it using Roman numerals (IV), tick marks (||||), or any other way we agree on. The information has not changed in each case, although the data has. Note that we tend to think of information in terms of declarative knowledge. That is, the facts we know such as a temperature, an age, etc. Information can also be skills and things we know how to do, which is called procedural knowledge.

An important consequence of this distinction is that information has meaning (i.e. can inform), while data does not. Computers work with data (representations) and not information (meanings). This is why a computer will calculate the average employee number even though it is meaningless.

Note that one person's information may be another's data depending on whether the recipient understand the data (or its context). Also, when someone (or something, such as a computer system) is given a fact, it may only be data, but when they make sense of (or interpret) it, often by bringing it together with other facts, it may become information.

Information is usually thought of as, in a strict sense, a subset of data. However, sometimes the reverse interpretation can be taken (such as describing data as "raw information"). Data may also have a more specific sense in some fields (e.g.: referring to a certain type or set of information used in that context). When used pragmatically in everyday speech, it usually specifically refers to collections of numbers, or, in a wider sense, to any content not of relevance or interest to the speaker, or not (yet) understood by the speaker themselves in particular.

Data is unstructured, lacks context and may not be relevant to the recipient. When data is correctly organized, filtered and presented with context it can become information because it then has "value" to the recipient.

Data which is not information (i.e.: has not yet informed or been given a context) is often called raw data.