Information

Information is that which informs. It can be any type of data that enlightens a person in some way so that he or she can better undertake a particular activity or make a decision. For the Massai Mara warriors of Kenya, marks in the dirt may provide information about the presence of a lion, because they have learned to interpret this data so that they know the difference between different types of marks. Based on this information they would then take appropriate action—be very wary as they move forward. This same data (the marks in the dirt) for someone else may not provide information if that person has not learned how to interpret the data. However, a Massai warrior can verbally communicate his interpretation to another, telling him or her of the presence of the lion. The communication would then provide information to others even if they could not “read” the original data, provided that they understand the language that the Massai warrior uses, whether verbal or nonverbal.

This makes it clear that what is information (as opposed to mere data) depends very much on a person's existing knowledge and so his or her ability to interpret the data; whether this is raw data (marks in the dirt or inflation figures) or the data that have been processed by another (a communication about the presence of a lion or a communication about remortgaging one's house to beat inflation). Even data that have been interpreted by an expert and passed on to others in the form of a written or verbal communication in order to provide others with information upon which they can act, may not inform, or not inform in the way that was intended by the expert, if the recipient of the communication does not share some kind of common understanding and knowledge with the communicator. For example, engineering experts produced data to try and stop the launch of the Challenger space shuttle because the data they had informed them that launching in very cold temperatures was very likely to lead to a fatal accident caused by blowby. However, for nonengineers this data informed them that there was no direct correlation between temperature and blowby problems, and so they decided that they could launch the shuttle, leading to the fatal tragedy. Data, knowledge, and information are thus inextricably linked. Information is the product of data plus knowledge, with the creation of information from data depending on one's existing knowledge that allows one to make sense of the data.