Information And Data : Types and Knowledge

Information And Data : Types and Knowledge

Information can be quantitative or qualitative :

Quantitative	Quantitative information is information which can be accurately measured against a scale. e.g. temperature, height.
Qualitative	Qualitative information is information which involves an element of judgement or opinion. e.g. Is it better to travel by bus or train? How nice is fish and chips ?

Knowledge is the information, skills and experiences that have been learned by a human. New knowledge can be created from existing information by applying logical rules to the information. For example if we have the information :

John is Michael's brother. Michael is Mary's brother.

and know the logical rule that :

If person A is B's brother and B is C's brother then A is also C's brother.

Then we can reason that John is also Mary's brother. We have created new knowledge from information by applying rules. Reasoning with information to produce knowledge is one way of processing information, so knowledge is sometimes described as :

Knowledge = Information + Processing

GCSE ICT Companion 04 - (C) P Meakin 2004