Quantitative Data
A firm reports its financial numbers for a quarter. Market data firms record the numbers in their databases and offer the data to clients as a service.Qualitative Data
A hotel conducts ladder interviews with customers to discover the source of poor ratings and reviews. They discover that beds are uncomfortable and staff are unfriendly.User Input
An ecommerce site collects user input such as product reviews.Event Data
An ecommerce site triggers an event when a customer puts an item in their shopping cart that causes product suggestions for the customer to be recalculated.Machine Data
An aircraft engine reports an unusually high temperature to an aircraft.Transactional Data
A bank records a transfer of funds in its systems.Reference Data
A bank maintains a list of standard currency codes such as EUR for the euro. Changes to this data rarely occur but are used as a reference for other data such as currency exchange transactions.Master Data
Master data is information that an organization uses over and over again such that it is shared by many systems. For example, customer data such as a customer's name, address and account number.Raw Data
A weather station reports sensor readings in a message format that is processed before being stored in a weather database.Unstructured Data
Unstructured data is information that isn't designed to be read by machines. For example, the text of an email. Although it is not structured for machines, they may read it anyway using natural language processing techniques.Media
Media files such as photos and videos.Metadata
Data that describes other data such as a photo that contains embedded copyright notices.Hard Data
A verifiable fact such as the result of a blood test.Soft Data
Information that is based on human perception, analysis or opinion such as a hospital patient who says they feel fine.Small Data
Data that can be stored and processed on a single machine such as a project schedule that is stored in a file.Big Data
Data that is so large that it requires multiple machines such as a cloud computing platform to store and process as a single collection. For example, the data collected by a large scale medical study.Dark Data
Big data that is collected but never used. For example, a retailer who tracks and records every visitors behavior in their stores but never finds a way to use this data.| Overview: Data Examples | ||
Type | ||
Definition | Information that can be processed by machines. | |
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