What is Data?

When some people hear the word,  “Data”, what comes to their mind is complexity and big computers. By this I mean, most folks understanding of what constitutes “Data” is  not expansive enough and quite limited and sometimes confusing. So what exactly is DATA?

In a nutshell, Data is anything that can be counted, categorized, listed, seen, unseen, imagined,, and so on. Here are some example, the list of your friends names, the food you ate today, the number of people that live on your street, the number of strangers you saw today, the number of wishes you want fulfilled. So, as you can see, data is just about anything, seen and unseen, touchable and not.

Do you need computers to gather Data?  Absolutely no. If so, what role do computer play in  Data ?

Computers simply make gathering, sharing and categorizing already gathered Data easy to understand, by storing them and then, offering  them for sharing when needed.

In advanced usage, computer can also, use already gathered data to make predictions, based on patterns of occurrence of a particular data in a Dataset.

Predictive analysis is the method of using a pattern of occurrence to guess that a similar event will\may occur in the future based on a past occurrence in the same dataset.

So what again is  Data? Data is both the seen and unseen events and things that surrounds us in our everyday life. Data is just anything that we can put together to use  or study.

We don’t need computers to gather nor visualize Data.

Computers only make sharing and gathering Data easier.

Once base Data is gathered, anyone can then use a methodology known as predictive analysis to predict a future event based on a pattern of occurrence in the dataset.