There are many persons that use data and information in an interchangeable way and these two concepts essentially are of same meaning to them, but while data and information are closely related to each other, they bear completely different meanings.

Data is a fact and something that should be applied some standards to create a meaningful product. The standards to be applied are special algorithms applied based on type of the data.

Let's have a closer look at algorithms to see what an algorithm means.

An algorithm is a set of clearly defined steps to accomplish a certain task. Different tasks need different algorithms and all computer programs are created based on necessary algorithms.

Data is a crude fact and to make it something meaningful and useful special algorithms should be used. Indeed data is processed through algorithms and the eventual product created at the end of processing stage is called information.

Scrambled messages are good examples of data. The text before getting scrambled is information to someone that knows the language that the text has been written in, but after applying an special algorithm (scrambling) it changes into data and after finally processing it (descrambling stage) the data becomes the initial information.

Another example is a foreign language. A text written in a specific language that is not understandable to someone is data. Learning the meaning of the words of a specific language is not sufficient to understand the meaning of a text written in that language.

You will need to apply special algorithms, that in this case is the grammar of that language, to get a meaningful text. The final meaningful text is the information.

It is worth noting that data is the plural form of the Latin word datum and grammatically it is a name, but data is used as a single name too.