• Data: a collection of facts
• Information: data that have been processed into a format that is understandable by its intended audience
• Knowledge: the perception of fact or truth; clear and certain mental apprehension

Progression: data is gathered to provide information in order to gain knowledge.

We have exposure to more data today than we ever have in the history of the world. Back in 2006, IBM put out a white paper, The toxic terabyte: How data-dumping threatens business efficiency, stating that by 2010 the amount of data available in the world would double every 11 hours. Last year, a British news source reported that the world’s digital content was equal to a stack of books stretching from Earth to Pluto 10 times. (this is just the digital data, mind you!) If you want some really mind-blowing facts on data, check out Tim Berners-Lee’s talk from the TED conferences in 2009.

Back in the late ’90s, Michael Lesk, a renowned professor of Library and Information Sciences at Rutgers University, conducted a study trying to estimate the amount of information available in the world. He drew this conclusion which reflects the world we now live in:

“Today the digital library community spends some effort on scanning, compression, and OCR; tomorrow it will have to focus almost exclusively on selection, searching, and quality assessment. Input will not matter as much as relevant choice. Missing information won’t be on the tip of your tongue; it will be somewhere in your files. Or, perhaps, it will be in somebody else’s files. With all of everyone’s work online, we will have the opportunity first glimpsed by H. G. Wells (and a bit later and more concretely by Vannevar Bush) to let everyone use everyone else’s intellectual effort. We could build a real `World Encyclopedia’ with a true `planetary memory for all mankind’ as Wells wrote in 1938. [Wells 1938]. He talked of “knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest;” we could do it. The challenge for librarians and computer scientists is to let us find the information we want in other people’s work; and the challenge for the lawyers and economists is to arrange the payment structures so that we are encouraged to use the work of others rather than re-create it.”