data processing

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Information processing. (Discuss)

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (February 2008)

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (September 2009)

Computer data processing is any process that uses a computer program to enter data and summarise, analyse or otherwise convert data into usable information. The process may be automated and run on a computer. It involves recording, analysing, sorting, summarising, calculating, disseminating and storing data. Because data are most useful when well-presented and actually informative, data-processing systems are often referred to as information systems. Nevertheless, the terms are roughly synonymous, performing similar conversions; data-processing systems typically manipulate raw data into information, and likewise information systems typically take raw data as input to produce information as output.

Data processing may or may not be distinguished from data conversion, when the process is merely to convert data to another format, and does not involve any data manipulation.

Data analysis

When the domain from which the data are harvested is a science or an engineering field, data processing and information systems are considered terms that are too broad and the more specialized term data analysis is typically used. This is a focus on the highly-specialized and highly-accurate algorithmic derivations and statistical calculations that are less often observed in the typical general business environment. In these contexts data analysis packages like DAP, gretl or PSPP are often used. This divergence of culture is exhibited in the typical numerical representations used in data processing versus numerical; data processing's measurements are typically represented by integers or by fixed-point or binary-coded decimal representations of numbers whereas the majority of data analysis's measurements are often represented by floating-point representation of rational numbers.

Processing

Practically all naturally occurring processes can be viewed as examples of data processing systems where "observable" information in the form of pressure, light, etc. are converted by human observers into electrical signals in the nervous system as the senses we recognize as touch, sound, and vision. Even the interaction of non-living systems may be viewed in this way as rudimentary information processing systems. Conventional usage of the terms data processing and information systems restricts their use to refer to the algorithmic derivations, logical deductions, and statistical calculations that recur perennially in general business environments, rather than in the more expansive sense of all conversions of real-world measurements into real-world information in, say, an organic biological system or even a scientific or engineering system.

Elements of data processing

In order to be processed by a computer, data needs first be converted into a machine readable format. Once data is in digital format, various procedures can be applied on the data to get useful information. Data processing may involve various processes, including:

• Data acquisition
• Data entry
• Data cleaning
• Data coding
• Data tranformation
• Data translation
• Data summarization
• Data aggregation
• Data validation
• Data tabulation
• Statistical analysis
• Computer graphics
• Data warehousing
• Data mining

See also

• Data processor
• Two pass verification

References

Further reading

• Linda B., Bourque, Linda B., Bourgue, Virginia A., Clark, Processing Data: The Survey Example (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences), Sage Publications, Inc. (December 14, 2008), ISBN 08056781901