Although the two terms, data and information, are often used indiscriminately, they both have a specific meaning. Data can be described as different observations, which are collected and stored.
Information is that data, which is useful in answering queries or solving a problem.
Digitizing a large number of maps provides a large amount of data after hours of painstaking works, but the data can only render useful information if it is used in analysis. Geographic data are organised in a geographic database. This database can be considered as a collection of spatially referenced data that acts as a model of reality. The attributes refer to the properties of spatial entities. They are often referred to as non-spatial data since they do not in themselves represent location information.