By: Dhanshree Lakkad
What is data?
Data are characteristics or information, usually numerical, that are collected through observation. In a more technical sense, data are a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables about one or more persons or objects, while a datum (singular of data) is a single value of a single variable. But that is not the only data definition; there exist other types of data as well. So, what is the data? Data can be texts or numbers written on papers, or it can be bytes and bits inside the memory of electronic devices, or it could be facts that are stored inside a person’s mind
Data is a set of values of subjects with respect to qualitative or quantitative variables. Data is raw, unorganized facts that need to be processed. When data is processed, organized, structured or presented in a given context so as to make it useful, it is called information.
Some of the factors that have contributed to the growth of digital data are as follows:
• Flexible data processing technologies: Data processing technologies should develop to fulfill the demanding business requirements. To further evolve the process of data generation and growth, old architectures, difficult and risky transitions and complex
Deployments should be eliminated.
• Affordable cost of digital storage: The low cost of the storage devices has provided an affordable and easy solution to the data storage problem.
• Faster communication technology: The rate of sharing digital data is now much faster and it is growing every day. It now takes just a few seconds to capture a picture and
share the same.
TYPES OF DATAA
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.
Common examples of structured data are Excel files or SQL databases. Each of these have structured rows and columns that can be sorted. Structured data depends on the existence of a data model – a model of how data can be stored, processed and accessed
Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well. Unstructured data can be found in different forms: from web pages to emails, from blogs to social media posts, etc. 80% of the data we have is known to be unstructured. Regardless of the format used for storing the data, we are talking, in most cases, about textual documents made of sequences of words.
Semi-structured data is a form of structured data that does not obey the tabular structure of data models associated with relational databases or other forms of data tables, but nonetheless contains tags or other markers to separate semantic elements and enforce hierarchies of records and fields within the data.
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