Data (computing)

Data (treated as singular, plural, or as a

mass noun) is any sequence of one or
more symbols. Datum is a single symbol
of data. Data requires interpretation to
become information.
Various types of data which can be visualized through
a computer device

Digital data is data that is represented

using the binary number system of ones
(1) and zeros (0), as opposed to analog
representation. In modern (post 1960)
computer systems, all data is digital. Data
within a computer, in most cases, moves
as parallel data. Data moving to or from a
computer, in most cases, moves as serial
data. Data sourced from an analog device,
such as a temperature sensor, may be
converted to digital using an analog-to-
digital converter.
Data representing quantities, characters,
or symbols on which operations are
performed by a computer are stored and
recorded on magnetic, optical, electronic,
or mechanical recording media, and
transmitted in the form of digital electrical
or optical signals.[1]

A program is data in the form of coded

instructions to control the operation of a
computer or other machine.[2] Physical
computer memory elements consist of an
address and a byte/word of data storage.
Digital data are often stored in relational
databases, like tables or SQL databases,
and can generally be represented as
abstract key/value pairs.

Data can be organized in many different

types of data structures, including arrays,
graphs, and objects. Data structures can
store data of many different types,
including numbers, strings and even other
data structures. Data pass in and out of
computers via peripheral devices.

In an alternate usage, binary files (which

are not human-readable) are sometimes
called "data" as distinguished from human-
readable "text".[3] The total amount of
digital data in 2007 was estimated to be
281 billion gigabytes (= 281
exabytes).[4][5]Digital data comes in these
three states: data at rest, data in transit
and data in use.

Characteristics
To translate data to information, there
must be several known factors
considered. The factors involved are
determined by the creator of the data and
the desired information. Metadata is data
about the data. Metadata may be implied,
specified or given. Data relating to physical
events or processes will also have a
temporal component. In almost all cases
this temporal component is implied. This
is the case when a device such as a
temperature logger receives data from a
temperature sensor. When the
temperature is received it is assumed that
the data has a temporal reference of now.
So the device records the date, time and
temperature together. When the data
logger communicates temperatures, it
must also report the date and time
(metadata) for each temperature reading.

At its most essential, a single datum is a

value stored at a specific location.
Fundamentally, computers follow a
sequence of instructions they are given in
the form of data. A set of instructions to
perform a given task (or tasks) is called a
"program". In the nominal case, the
program, as executed by the computer, will
consist of binary machine code. The
elements of storage manipulated by the
program, but not actually executed by the
CPU, are also data. Program instructions,
and the data that the program
manipulates, are both stored in exactly the
same way. Therefore, it is possible for
computer programs to operate on other
computer programs, by manipulating their
programmatic data.
The line between program and data can
become blurry. An interpreter, for example,
is a program. The input data to an
interpreter is itself a program, just not one
expressed in native machine language. In
many cases, the interpreted program will
be a human-readable text file, which is
manipulated with a text editor program
(more normally associated with plain text
data). Metaprogramming similarly involves
programs manipulating other programs as
data. Programs like compilers, linkers,
debuggers, program updaters, virus
scanners and such use other programs as
their data.
To store data bytes in a file, they have to
be serialized in a "file format". Typically,
programs are stored in special file types,
different from those used for other data.
Executable files contain programs; all
other files are also data files. However,
executable files may also contain "in-line"
data which is built into the program. In
particular, some executable files have a
data segment, which nominally contains
constants and initial values (both data).

For example: a user might first instruct the

operating system to load a word processor
program from one file, and then edit a
document stored in another file with the
word processor program. In this example,
the document would be considered data. If
the word processor also features a spell
checker, then the dictionary (word list) for
the spell checker would also be
considered data. The algorithms used by
the spell checker to suggest corrections
would be either machine code data or text
in some interpretable programming
language.

Data keys and values,

structures and persistence
Keys in data provide the context for
values. Regardless of the structure of data,
there is always a key component present.
Data keys in data and data-structures are
essential for giving meaning to data
values. Without a key that is directly or
indirectly associated with a value, or
collection of values in a structure, the
values become meaningless and cease to
be data. That is to say, there has to be at
least a key component linked to a value
component in order for it to be considered
data. Data can be represented in
computers in multiple ways, as per the
following examples:

RAM …
Random Access Memory holds data
that the computer processor(s) has
direct access to. A computer processor
(CPU) may only manipulate data within
itself (Processor register) or memory.
This is as opposed to data storage,
where the processor(s) must move data
between the storage device (disk,
tape...) and memory. RAM is an array of
one (1) or more block(s) of linear
contiguous locations that a processor
may read or write by providing an
address for the read or write operation.
The "random" part of RAM means that
the processor may operate on any
location in memory at any time in any
order. (Also see Memory management
unit). In RAM the smallest element of
data is the "Binary Bit". The capabilities
and limitations of accessing RAM are
processor specific. In general main
memory or RAM is arranged as an array
of "sets of electronic on/off switches" or
locations beginning at address 0
(hexadecimal 0). Each location can
store usually 8, 16, 32 or 64 parallel bits
depending on the processor (CPU)
architecture. Therefore, any value stored
in a byte in RAM has a matching
location expressed as an offset from the
first memory location in the memory
 array i.e. 0+n, where n is the offset into
the array of memory locations.

Keys …

Data keys need not be a direct hardware

address in memory. Indirect, abstract
and logical keys codes can be stored in
association with values to form a data
structure. Data structures have
predetermined offsets (or links or paths)
from the start of the structure, in which
data values are stored. Therefore, the
data key consists of the key to the
structure plus the offset (or links or
paths) into the structure. When such a
structure is repeated, storing variations
 of [the data values and the data keys]
within the same repeating structure, the
result can be considered to resemble a
table, in which each element of the
repeating structure is considered to be a
column and each repetition of the
structure is considered as a row of the
table. In such an organization of data,
the data key is usually a value in one (or
a composite of the values in several of)
the columns.

Organised recurring data structures …

The tabular view of repeating data

structures is only one of many
possibilities. Repeating data structures
 can be organised hierarchically, such
that nodes are linked to each other in a
cascade of parent-child relationships.
Values and potentially more complex
data-structures are linked to the nodes.
Thus the nodal hierarchy provides the
key for addressing the data structures
associated with the nodes. This
representation can be thought of as an
inverted tree. E.g. Modern computer
operating system file-systems are a
common example; and XML is another.

Sorted or ordered data …

Data has some inherent features when it

is sorted on a key. All the values for
 subsets of the key appear together.
When passing sequentially through
groups of the data with the same key, or
a subset of the key changes, this is
referred to in data processing circles as
a break, or a control break. It particularly
facilitates aggregation of data values on
subsets of a key.

Peripheral storage …

Until the advent of non-volatile computer

memories like USB sticks, persistent
data storage was traditionally achieved
by writing the data to external block
devices like magnetic tape and disk
drives. These devices typically seek to a
location on the magnetic media and
then read or write blocks of data of a
predetermined size. In this case, the
seek location on the media, is the data
key and the blocks are the data values.
Early data file-systems, or disc operating
systems used to reserve contiguous
blocks on the disc drive for data files. In
those systems, the files could be filled
up, running out of data space before all
the data had been written to them. Thus
much unused data space was reserved
unproductively to avoid incurring that
situation. This was known as raw disk.
Later file-systems introduced partitions.
They reserved blocks of disc data space
for partitions and used the allocated
blocks more economically, by
dynamically assigning blocks of a
partition to a file as needed. To achieve
this, the file-system had to keep track of
which blocks were used or unused by
data files in a catalog or file allocation
table. Though this made better use of
the disc data space, it resulted in
fragmentation of files across the disc,
and a concomitant performance
overhead due to latency. Modern file
systems reorganize fragmented files
dynamically to optimize file access
times. Further developments in file
systems resulted in virtualization of disc
 drives i.e. where a logical drive can be
defined as partitions from a number of
physical drives.

Indexed data …

Retrieving a small subset of data from a

much larger set implies searching
though the data sequentially. This is
uneconomical. Indexes are a way to
copy out keys and location addresses
from data structures in files, tables and
data sets, then organize them using
inverted tree structures to reduce the
time taken to retrieve a subset of the
original data. In order to do this, the key
of the subset of data to be retrieved
 must be known before retrieval begins.
The most popular indexes are the B-tree
and the dynamic hash key indexing
methods. Indexing is yet another costly
overhead for filing and retrieving data.
There are other ways of organizing
indexes, e.g. sorting the keys or
correction of quantities (or even the key
and the data together), and using a
binary search on them.

Abstraction and indirection …

Object orientation uses two basic

concepts for understanding data and
software: 1) The taxonomic rank-
structure of program-code classes,
which is an example of a hierarchical
data structure; and 2) At run time, the
creation of data key references to in-
memory data-structures of objects that
have been instantiated from a class
library. It is only after instantiation that
an executing object of a specified class
exists. After an object's key reference is
nullified, the data referred to by that
object ceases to be data because the
data key reference is null; and therefore
the object also ceases to exist. The
memory locations where the object's
data was stored are then referred to as
garbage and are reclassified as unused
memory available for reuse.
Database data …

The advent of databases introduced a

further layer of abstraction for
persistent data storage. Databases use
meta data, and a structured query
language protocol between client and
server systems, communicating over a
network, using a two phase commit
logging system to ensure transactional
completeness, when persisting data.

Parallel distributed data processing …

Modern scalable / high performance

data persistence technologies rely on
massively parallel distributed data
 processing across many commodity
computers on a high bandwidth
network. An example of one is Apache
Hadoop. In such systems, the data is
distributed across multiple computers
and therefore any particular computer in
the system must be represented in the
key of the data, either directly, or
indirectly. This enables the
differentiation between two identical
sets of data, each being processed on a
different computer at the same time.

See also
Assembly language
Big data
Bus (computing)
Byte
Computer memory
CPU
CPU cache
Data
Data dictionary
Data modeling
Data network
Data storage device
Data stream
Data type
Database
Databus
Data set
Digital data
Foreign key
Hash key
Information processor
Instruction set
Memory address/location/key
Offset (computer science)
Primary/unique key
Processor register
Shift register
State (computer science)
Tuple
Value (computer science)
 Von Neumann architecture

References
1. "data" . Oxford Dictionaries. Archived
from the original on 2012-10-06.
Retrieved 2012-10-11.
2. "computer program" . The Oxford
Pocket Dictionary of Current English.
Archived from the original on 2011-
11-28. Retrieved 2012-10-11.
3. "file(1)" . OpenBSD Manual Pages.
2015-12-24. Archived from the
original on 2018-02-05. Retrieved
2018-02-04.
 4. Paul, Ryan (March 12, 2008). "Study:
amount of digital info > global storage
capacity" . Ars Technics. Archived
from the original on March 13, 2008.
Retrieved 2008-03-12.
5. Gantz, John F.; et al. (2008). "The
Diverse and Exploding Digital
Universe" . International Data
Corporation via EMC. Archived from
the original on 2008-03-11. Retrieved
2008-03-12.

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