Today I want to start a series of articles on information management. I want to look at what information is, how it relates to our lives, why it's important to think about it, how people work with it, etc. My goal with this and the following posts is to better understand the nature of the information to design better information management tools.
To understand what it is we need to take a look at data. Data is a description of an object, relationship between objects or a process. I couldn't come up with a better definition. Numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, smells are all data and they represent something to us.
Most of what we perceive in the world is gradual. There are no distinct borders between colors. On the spectrum one color changes into the other. Time is continuous as well. We created minutes and hours to measure it. We enumerate and simplify data naturally (often without thinking about it) to make it easier for us to work with it. Different pieces of data describe a small characteristic of an object, relationship, process. Looking at a brick we can figure out its size, material it is made from, weight, etc. All of these describe different aspects of the brick. We enumerated information on the brick. Without doing it it would be hard to calculate how many bricks we will need to build a house or how tall it can be before it will collapse. Use of correct tools can help us capture this information and use it more effectively.
Information is a collection of data organized into a pattern. Humans are very good at recognizing patterns and finding associated meaning. Keep in mind that data and information are objective, but their meaning is very subjective. A brick is a brick no matter who looks at it. Associated meaning (how we see it) can differ. One person might decide to use it for construction, another to use it as a weapon, while third uses it as a paperweight.
When looking at the information we might recognize it. In that case we automatically recall associated meaning. When we look at a red, rectangular stone we recognize it as a brick. Actually we like to recognize patterns and understand the information we are presented with.
Patterns we fail to recognize are noise and are very, very boring because we think they are useless. TV snow is a random pattern of black and white dots. We might recognize that something is wrong with TV, but we probably will not be able to understand all signals that force dots to be arranged in one pattern and not the other.
In the next post I want to talk more about how people work with information. This is directly related what kind of tools can help them do their job better.