We explain that it is a data in computer science and what are the types of data that exist. In addition, examples and what is information.
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What is a data?
In computer science , the information are symbolic representations (that is to say: numerical, alphabetic, algorithmic, etc.) of a certain attribute or qualitative or quantitative variable, that is: the codified description of an empirical fact , an event, an entity.
The information is, thus, the information (values or referents) that the computer receives through different means, and that is manipulated through the processing of the programming algorithms . Its content can be virtually any : statistics, numbers, descriptors, which separately have no relevance to system users , but can be interpreted as a whole to obtain complete and specific information.
They are particularly important for the data structure , branch of computing that studies the particular way of storing information in minimum portions to achieve a subsequent efficient recovery.
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Type of data
In computing, when we speak of information types (or simply “type”) we refer to an attribute that is indicated to the computer regarding the nature of the data that is available to process. This includes delimiting or restricting the data, defining the values that can be taken, what operations can be performed with them, etc.
Some types of data are:
- Characters . Individual digits that can be represented by numeric data (0-9), letters (az) or other symbols.
- Unicode characters . Unicode is a coding standard that allows you to represent data more efficiently, thus allowing up to 65535 different characters.
- Numeric . They can be real or whole numbers, depending on what is necessary.
- Booleans . They represent logical values (true or false).
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Examples of data
Some examples of computer information can be those that make up the hierarchy of computer data, in an ascending pyramid from the most basic to the most complex:
- Bits . Each input of the binary code language, that is, 1 or 0.
- Characters . Numbers, letters or special characters, each formed from a combination of bits . For example: the decimal number 99 corresponds to 1100011 in binary.
- Fields . Ordered set of characters, for example a word, such as the name and / or surname of the user filling an online form.
- Records . Sets of ordered fields, such as those needed to log in to our email.
- Files . Ordered sets of records, such as the cookies that web pages keep in our system and contain the information of the sessions that we have started.
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Information (in computing)
In computing, information is understood as the set of ordered data, sequenced, processed by a programming algorithm , which allow recomposing a referent, as a concrete fact or some real sense.
The recovery of the information from the packages or data sets is, thus, the final goal of the computation, since the computer systems encode and represent the information through different mechanisms and languages that allow them to communicate with each other in a fast and efficient.
