Data and Information

Management :
Data representation and storage

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 Computers store
 Information
 Numbers
 Characters
 Sound
 Pictures etc. in Binary format i.e. 0 or 1

 Because computers can only store and understand 2 states:

 whether a circuit has current flowing or not
 circuit is closed or open
 voltage is high or low
 on or off
 true / false

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 QUESTION

HOW COULD COMPUTERS

ALL OVER THE WORLD BE
USED WITH ALL THE
DIFFERENT LANGUAGES?

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 ASCII
 Code Standard Code for Information Interchange
American
 Each character gets represented in a standard character set as
a single 7 bit binary code.
 Up to a 128 different characters and simple communications
protocols can be stored. It is an sufficient amount for all
characters on a standard keyboard as well as some control
codes.
 It is the basic code usedCharacter
in mostASCII
computers to allow
ASCII Decimal
communication between computers. (bin) (hex)

1 36 A 1000001 41 65

l t + you B 1000010 42 66
s s A
th en r.
p re rd c te C 1000011 43 67
le a
o h ar a
p y b …
x am e ke ê” c
E t h a “ a 97
On l see z
l
Wi special
characters
numbers
!
ASCII Code

 If the 1 key is pressed then ‘0110001’ is sent to

the CPU.

 If the ‘B’ key is pressed ‘1000010’ is sent to the

CPU.

 If the ‘ë’ character is needed the user enters alt

+ 137 and that binary code then gets sent to
the CPU.
ASCII Code
 When plain text is saved in a file, it is stored in ASCII coding.
ASCII coding uses 1 byte per character. All these characters can
then be converted to a string of 1 and 0’s.

 The ASCII was extended with time (extended ASCII) to use 8

bits
 Which lead to the fact that 256 characters could be
represented

 Unicode
 Was developed after ASCII to be able to compromise for
more than 110 000 characters
 The first 128 characters of Unicode corresponds one-to-one
with the ASCII.
 Unicode 6.3 is the latest version with 110 187 characters it
represents and was released in September 2013.

 UTF -8
 Is an upgrade of Unicode mostly used in HTML documents

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. Open a Word Document
. Click on INSERT / SYMBOL

The wanted
character
The code that
represents
the character

Different
systems used
for character
representatio
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n
Graphics

 Graphics consist of pixels.

 These pixels are arranged into rows on the screen.

 If a graphics resolution is 800 x 600 it means

 that there are 800 pixels from the left to right
 and 600 pixels from the top to bottom
 the picture consists of a total of 480 000 pixels

 Each of these pixels has two properties:

 the colour (represented by a binary code)
 the Location on the screen

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Overview of different primitive
data types and their storage
 Different programming languages make use of
different primitive data types to store data used in the
programming.

 Examples are
 Integer
 Real / Floating-Point
 Text/String
 Boolean

 Because we are only going to use Delphi (programming

language) we are going to have a look at the basic
primitive data types that Delphi make use of.

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 Integers
 Integers are whole numbers with which different mathematical
manipulations can be done.

 This numbers are stored by the computer as binary numbers using a

whole number of bytes.
Datatype Bytes Range
Byte 1 -128..127
Short Integer 2 -32768..32767
Integer 4 -2147483648..2147483647
Long Integer 8 -9223372036854775808..
9223372036854775804

 The difference is simply that long integers can store larger numbers.

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 Floating-Point Representation

+ 5240.789 is a real number. This number is represented in floating-point

with a fraction and an exponent as follows:

Fraction Exponent
+5.240789 +03

Scientific notation : + 5.240789  10+3

 Leftmost bit = sign bit (0 positive or 1 negative).

The biggest problem is that accuracy can not be reliable. Some programs can
only store up to a certain amount of exponents and fractions where other programs
can store more accurately.
 String/Text Variables
 In Delphi we can set up the amount of characters we
would like the string to consist of. (This will be discussed in Grade 11)

 If you would want to type in the name of a City

E.g. POLOKWANE

 This means that the program can make space for 9

characters for the city. Usually set by the programmer.

 But if anyone wants to type in JOHANNESBURG, there

are 3 characters more that what the program expected.
This problems leads to truncation and overflow which
means the string is misrepresented.
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 Boolean Variables

Yes / No
True / False

 Only uses 1 byte to store information.

 Examples :
 a flash drive is connected or not
 the ‘Delete’ key is pressed
 The computer must be turned on or not

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Overview of data structures

 A Data structure is a certain way data is stored and

organised in so that the use of the data can be
optimized.

 There are a lot of different kinds of data structures

which allows us to manage large amounts of data
efficiently depending on our data type and what is
expected.

 When we save files/documents on our computers, or

whether we use information from the internet, we make
use of data structures, because all data is saved in
different ways all over the world.
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When we save documents on our computers, we save it using
different folders within different folders that all contain
different files.

My
Documen
ts

Pictures Music

Rock Pop Jazz

New

Old

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 When we want to retrieve information from the internet there
are also a hierarchy from where the data comes from. This
data structure usually consists of databases being saved and
connected all over the world to be able to retrieve a lot of
information.
Data
Highest level Warehous
es

Database
s AD
colle ata Ware
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of di of differe e is large
conn fferent nt
Files ecte data databas
to pr dt so es
oduc ogether urces
repo
rts o e large a to be abl
ware r que mou e
h ou r i es. T nts of
crea
Bytes te pa ses are a hese da
ttern ls ta
s in v o used t
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Lowest level Bits
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Complete worksheet

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