On Data
Random thoughts
The universe is made of information. You might even say that the universe is information. And with time, the quantity of information is increasing. A physicist might tell you that this is the only credible definition of time. The direction in which information increases.
It’s difficult to separate (or even distinguish) data from information. One could say that information and data are two incarnations of the same thing. Information is what something means. While data is what that something is.
Regardless, and just like information, there is a lot of data in the world. A useful subset of this is “digitised data”, or data processable by computers. Digitised data is particularly useful because it provides precise (though not always accurate) snapshots of various aspects of our life. For example, your finances listed on a spreadsheet will precisely tell you if you are over-spending (if you have entered the correct data, i.e. the data is accurate).
Digitized Data in particular, and Data in general, is roughly useful in three ways.
- Communication. You can use data to communicate various ideas. The data itself remains unchanged, but when data possessed by one person is shared with another, we can solve more problems.
- Reduction. You can start with a dataset and solve a narrow problem with that data set. For example, you can start with income statistics for the whole of Sri Lanka and conclude which areas suffer from the most amount of poverty.
- Expansion. You can start with a data set and expand it to represent more knowledge. For example, you can start with the results of past elections in Sri Lanka and cluster the country by various areas with specific political affiliations.
All three ways of using data have one thing in common: They all try to answer questions or solve problems. Whether or not data is useful depends on whether we can use it to answer useful questions.
Conversely, if you don’t have useful questions, you probably have no use for data.
