ABSTRACT
There is at present no well-defined definition of such terms as ‘data’ and ‘information’ upon which there is general agreement. It is noteworthy that a current encyclopaedia of software engineering (Morris and Tamm, 1993) contains no entries for either ‘data’ or ‘information’. Indeed one entry asserts that
If there were general agreement on the meaning of ‘data’ and ‘information’, the terms could be taken as given. Without such agreement, some analysis is necessary. [Some definitions from the literature of ‘data’ and ‘information’ are shown in Tables 3.1 and 3.2.]
Anderton (1991) gives some useful examples which illustrate that there are subtleties associated with the idea of information and its communication to others.
