Data is raw facts collected from environment about physical phenomena or business transactions. Data can be in any form-numerical, textual, graphical, image, sound, video etc. It has no meaning. It is input to any system in an organization. For example, data would be the marks obtained by students in different subjects.

On the other hand information is defined as refined or processed data that has been transformed into meaningful and useful form for specific users. For example, after processing the marks obtained by student it transformed into information, which is meaningful and from which we can decide which student stood first, second and so forth. Information comes from data and takes the form of table, graphs, diagrams etc.

 

Data hierarchy \file organization concept


A computer system organizes data in a hierarchy that starts with bits and bytes and progresses to fields, records, files, and databases. A bit represents the smallest unit of data a computer can handle. A group of bits, called a byte, represents a single character, which can be a letter, a number, or another symbol. A grouping of characters into a word, a group of words, or a complete number (such as a person‘s name or age) is called a field. A group of related fields, such as the student‘s name, the course taken, the date, and the grade, comprises a record; a group of records of the same type is called a file.