Entities and phenomena are both the product of an observer's values and decisions as to what is worthy of further attention. Science is about predictability, and the predictability derives from models. Data are limited to the special case of what happened when the measurements were made. Models, on the other hand, subsume data. Only through models can data be used to say what will happen again, before subsequent measurements are made.
Data alone predict nothing.
Observer and observed both contribute to the scale of phenomena. Material systems have immutable scalar properties, but this does not mean that the material world fixes the scale of observation. The material world stubbornly retains its scalar properties, but scale of observation, like the criteria for foreground and background, comes from observer decisions. Scale defines the dimensions of the measurement frames used in a sampling protocol. Scope of a sampling protocol, which is simply the ratio of the extent to the grain, is useful for comparative work.