[AUDIO LOGO]

MATTHEW HAINS: We're going to look now at a very quick brief topic called data versus information. Do you like the picture I made for you? It's pretty cool. Anyway, moving on. What is data, and what is information? What is the difference between them? Well, let's have a look.

Here we have a slide where this is just data. This is just random stuff. Nothing in here has any particular meaning in this entire graphic. There's no sense of what this picture is for or what it's about. It's just data. Data is just all over the page.

But when we take a look at this slide now, here we have information. What is the difference? Because you can see we have names, addresses, postal codes. We know that just by looking at this. That's information.

So how did this become information, where this didn't make any sense? That's the difference between data and information. Let me take you through it.

Data is simply raw facts. It doesn't have any meaning. It doesn't make any sense. It just sits there. Data requires processing. We can't understand it. It doesn't make any sense. It's unfiltered. That's what data is all about.

Whereas information is now when we take that data, and we process it. It becomes information. It now has meaning. It has structure. It's useful. It provides us with answers. And we can understand what it says or what it's about, what it's telling us.

That's the difference between data and information. Data, raw facts, unprocessed information. Information, processed data. I hope that makes sense.

So for example, here we have a whole lot of words. We have data. It's inputs. So we provide inputs. The data gets put into the computer. We then have processing that takes place. Then once the processing has taken place, we then have information.

So we take something that is unfiltered, unprocessed. We process that, and then we have information. So it's like taking-- there's an example of a recipe, for example. So it's like taking this, which is what the computer sees, and we don't actually know what it is. It processes all of that to become that. And that's the difference between data and information.