Sensors

Where does data come from?

Data refers to factual information, measurements, statistics, or other pieces of information that can be used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, calculation, or decision-making.

We use data every day. When you look at the outside temperature on your digital thermometer on the buffet.

The thing to remember about data is it is one facet of reality not the whole deal. We collect seemingly disparate observations of an object or phenomenon in order to suss out underlying principles that point towards the answers we seek. The temperature gives you a value which is probably within a degree Celcius of the "real" temperature and from that you determine how appropriate it is for what you want to do. If it shows 30ᵒ and you want to go to the beach, that's a good start. If you want to go skiing, you'll be disappointed. At its most basic you could keep a scrap of paper and pencil and jot down the temperatures every time you walk by your indoor/outdoor thermometer.

Here at OFH the issue is the quality of my penmanship and my memory for the location of scraps of paper. Most of our tools don't take scrap-of-paper as input, so we look for ways to measure and collect data in an electronic format. We store it to allow us to use common statistical and plotting tools against it to extract meaningful information if it exists.