Data Representation 

Data Representation –  So far we’ve been talking about data as something that’s just swimming about being poked into logical sequences, and told to form orderly patterns and generally shape up. Without identifying the different characteristics of data it’s like looking at a sea of insects as a heaving mass of movement rather than identifying each insect by its species or its purpose.
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Firstly, let’s separate data into two groups: analogue and digital

Analogue data is readable in real time and we read its information as a continuous process. We live our lives in analogue and we receive a continual stream of data via all our senses.

Digital data, in contrast, are made up of separate elements that in their most basic forms are the two numbers 0 and 1, the building blocks of binary language.

Now that we’re paddling in the gene pool of digital data, let’s looks at the single-celled amoeba of digital life as we know it: the bit. A bit is either 0 or 1. Next we have a nibble, which is four bits. You could say that 0 is a bit of a nibble. Or not. Anyway, on to the byte! A byte is eight bits, which also means it’s two nibbles. So a byte is two nibbles, a nibble is four bits, and a bit is a 0 or a 1.

Moving towards the deeper end of the digital gene pool, we find the bigger beasts like Kilobytes at 1024 bytes, Megabytes at 1024 Kilobytes, and the most powerful beast of them all, so far, which is the Yottabyte.

Here are three more digital data groups, and the first of these is the American Standard Code for Information Exchange, or ASCII, This uses binary code as a key to refer to 128 different characters and symbols, in the same kind of way that a spy might set up a code for passing secret information.

You’ll know about MP3 sound files of course. A music or sound file is a sequence of binary code that represents the patterns of sound waves, and the better the sound quality, the bigger the file, because a greater number of plotted points along the digital sound wave will take up more space.

Lastly, how about video? Again, for high quality video the file size is going to be ginormous and far too big for even a five minute video to be edited on a basic computer. How do you get round this? By compressing each frame of the film into a Moving Pictures Expert Group file, or MPEG,