Quality of information

What makes information valuable?

Information is a commidity, which means that it can be bought and sold, and therefore it potentially has value.

Information has increased value when some or all of the following are applied:


Accuracy

To make sure decisions will be accurate the information on a sales report must be accurate to the exact monetary value. This is extremely important as organisations need accurate information to stay in business.

For the information to remain accurate thorough erroring checking and regular updates must occur.


Up to Date

Some information only has value within a specific timescale, for instance share prices can change several times in a minute, and so buying recommendations that are produced would change quickly and would have no value at all once they were out of date.

Up-to-date information is needed when dealing with information produced on consumers' taste as its forever changing. This would be particularly important for an organisation ordering stock to sell to consumers for example a clothes shop wouldnt want to order lots of clothes that have gone out of fashion and wont be purchased.


Complete

If the information is not complete then it loses its value

If the information proceded about a householder for insurance purposes does not include the amount of money the house is being insured for then it is incomplete and loses value as the house will not be insured for the correct amount.


From a reliable source

Because of lack of control on the content included on internet websites this can often reuce the value of the information obtained. Individuals are often encouraged to obtain their information from trusted sources like the BBC websites or trusted newspapers or other recognised organisations as opposed to online resources which are written ad hoc by users such as, Wikipedia. It would certainly make sense to look at reviews if you were buying a new computer. Computer magazines reguarly test and report on equipment from a variety of manufacturers, and these provide valuable information which is more likely to be impartial than infromation from the manufacturers.


Relevant

Information is only valuable to somone who has a use for it, and its value will also depend on that potential use. For example, if a company has information on a summary sales report then it must show sales of individual memebers of staff if it is to be relevant for calculating staff commission bonuses

Processing Data

What is Processing?

Processing is the work the computer does on the data to convert into into information. This can involve many things like calculations, logical operations such as sorts and queries or changing the shape of a sound wave to make a sound lower or higher in pitch

What is information?

A computer is a data processing machine. Computers process data to produce information. Information is data that has been changed into something meaningful. For example, in a supermarket the data from the bar code is processed to produce a receipt with the item names and prices included.

Also another well known type of information is examination results. These may be represented by a graph that clearly show the different percentages that students achieved in a particular class. The raw examination marks would have been entered in as data, and the the processing would involve converinting those marks to standardised scores and allocating the appropriate grade before presenting them in graphical format. This information makes it much clearer to assess the performance of the group rather then simply using raw data as this would take much longer as well.

Supermarket loyalty cards capture data when they are used. Information like customer number, date and time of purchase and codes of products bought are captured when the card is used at the checkout. The information collected can help the supermarket a great deal giving them details about shopping habits which can then help them decide what special offers may tempt you to spend more at their store.

Questions

What is a disadvantage and an advantage of coding?

What are binary numbers?

Give some examples of what information is?

Encoding and coding data

Encoding needs to happen when data is collected. An example would be for fields on a paper-based document.

Data is often needed to be coded in order for it to be processed effectively. Value judgements are a good example of this. If as part of a survey you ask 100 people how good they think a resturant is, they will all most probably give a different answer. This makes it very hard to enter as data in order to analyse it further. However if they were asked to rate the resturant on a scale of 1 to 5, where on is excellent and 5 is very poor. This would mean that after all the data is collected only a single digit needs to be entered into the computer and the fact that is a single number makes it much easier to compare the resturant with another one already included in the survey.

Encoding Data

Computers use encoding to convert the data into a machine readable form. Even though its difficult for humans to understand, all computers can understand is binery's, 1's and 0's. Due to the fact that as humans cant understand this for us to use computers the data must be encoded into binary for a computer to process and share, e.g. encoding our language into a machine-readable form

A way of encoding text is by using ASCII to represent each character as a binary number.

Coding

Data can sometimes be coded before storage this changes the data into a shortened version by assigning a code. Data is coded essentially to keep it short, which saves storage space but also speeds the process up.

Some condings that you may be familiar with are:

Gender: M or F for Male or Female

Questionnaire answers: Y or N for Yes and No

To be made shorter during coding the colours below could be said to be blue, green, red and brown instead of the orginal colours of royal blue, emerald green, vivid red and chocolate brown.

However when the names are being shortened down this could result in the data losing some of its accuracy because not matter what colour blue it is even if it is light blue it will still just be named blue. Also some codes can be difficult to rememeber for example ISBN (International Standard Book Number) rather than its title!


Bar Codes


A main set of data which everyone must have come across is a bar code. These can play a leading role in stock control and customer ordering for web-based commerce in ware-housing. They are seen in many different forms e.g. UPC which is a Universal Product Code. However the most common form in the UK is EAN 13 which stands for European Article Number 13 digits and EAN 18 which stand for the same thing apart from 18 digits instead. The data is represented by a series of bars and spaces which are read by a bar-code scanner.

Bar codes are very versatile and can be read from many different angles and even upside down! All different products will have a unique number which is allocated by the European Article Number Association. Places where bar codes are used are student cards, products in warehouses and of course supermarkets. The output after the barcode has been scanned is the product description and the price will be shown on the monitor and printed out on a receipt.

Another coding system seen on books is known as the ISBN. This is very similar to a bar-code and all books are allocated a unique number which is called the composite code. Most ISBN codes use the same format as a bar code, which makes stock control much easier than traditional methods.

Data and Information

What is data?

Data represents raw facts and figures or a set of values. Other subjects may also gather data e.g Geogoraphy where data may be collected using a questionnaire.

A set of data might consist of 2, 4 , 3, 5, 6

another more familiar set of data which will be collected is examination results, such as 23, 45, 67, 98, 78

Types of data

Data doesnt always have to come in the form of text as numbers it can also take the form as moving images, or sound.


Bits and bytes

Not matter what type of data is being entered into the computer, it will always store and process the data using binary numbers. A single unit in binary is called a 'bit' which stands for a binary digit

Computer memory is measured in 'bytes'. One byte is made up of eight bits. One byte can store one character, for example:
The letter A is represented by 01000001, B by 01000010