Data, Info and Tech

Data, Information and Knowledge; The Difference
The things we see today on computer screens come in all sorts of various forms, and more often than not, have to be processed from a more basic point than what we see. Humans don't tend to normally do this themselves however, instead you'll find a computer doing most of the work when it comes to processing an information system. They take the most basic form, data, and process it into something that we can read more easily, information. From there, the computer would take this information within the system, and translate it into knowledge, something which would benefit us much more greatly than simple statistics. This is generally the purpose of an information system, to take data and process it into information, then process it into knowledge which a consumer or user can then use.

Data
Is the most basic form of information/knowledge you can come across. You'll find it in the form of something simple such as "1U" or "3shoe", just something that you can read and only tell from what it says. It'll only have basic words and numbers, no sentences, just the very basics that a person could need to know.

Information
Becomes the next step of useful. While it's not directly readable, you can still make out some points from it. As opposed to just have "1U", you might have "1 Unit counted", or instead of "3shoe" you might have "3 shoes available". It allows for a person reading it to deduce simple facts about what they need to know.

Knowledge
Contains the things we read every single day. It's the next step up from information and provides us with useful tips and facts that we can read and simply go "Yep, I need to do this". Unlike before, you might see things such as "1 unit counted, others not found" or "3 shoes available in shop, need more". It really gives the computer the ability to speak to humans, in a language that we can understand and use for our own benefit.

IPO Charts
An Input Process Output chart allows for a person to see the process it took from the input information to then become what we see on the output. Or rather, what a developer tells the computer, how the computer translates that, and then what the user gets and sees from the computer after it's done.

The Input comes from the environment and is put into the system, this can be in the form of raw data, or pre-existing data that has been input by another system.

The Process is the purpose for an information system to exist, it takes the input and operates upon it. Doing this changes the data into a different state, as achieved by the system's hardware and software.

The Output is the result of the processed data that was originally input. Without the output, the system can't contact the outside world, only the world can contact it. The output can be anything from a report based on the data, to pictures, video, audio or even games.

For example: In this, you can see a person has asked for an item name or it's ID, so the information system looked for related/relevant item names/IDs to match, and created a list of all the relevant ones. It then displayed that list to the user who asked for it from their input data. This is what an information system does.