Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
As human, we often want to make sense out of raw data. When encountered a piece of data,
we usually try to assign meaning to it, and try to find relationships for it. This is done by
associating it with other things (or other data points). For example, consider the shapes in
Figure 2.
c
b
e
d
a
Fig. 2. Data points in data space
When seeing the items in Figure 2, we will automatically assign an “equal” relationship to
item e and item b, assign the same relationship to item c and item d. We probably will
assign a “similarity relationship” to item b and item a.
Take another example, if seeing the digits “3 4 5 …”, most likely we will assign the meaning
of “a sequence of positive integer numbers starting from 3 and extending to infinity.” The
point is that when there is no context, these raw data have no meaning. When we try to
assign meanings to raw data, we are trying to create context for them. When raw data are
put into context, some new things will happen.
The new things are information. There are some differences and relationships between raw
data and information. First, information is not just a bunch of raw data piled together.
Second, information is the interaction between the raw data and something we called
“knowledge.” Information depends on the understanding of the person perceiving the data.
For example, the symbol “
网
页
”
means nothing to an English speaker (to him, it is just raw
data), but it conveys some information to a Chinese (to him, the same symbol is information
and means a web page). The point is that whether some raw data represent meaningful
information depends on the context. And the context is our prior experiences (often, we call
these prior experiences “knowledge”). There is no guarantee that the information we
extracted from raw data is correct. The correctness and usefulness of raw data depend on
the knowledge of the person receiving the data. Another thing to point out is that the
