Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.
Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.
Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.
Data only exists within the framework of a vision you're building to, a hypothesis of where you're moving to.
The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you.
Information is the resolution of uncertainty.
Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.
Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
