Data in machine readable form may be unintelligible to people, for example, barcodes and sensor readings. Despite this ' data ' and ' information ' are often used synonymously. For example, a collection of data items commonly called a 'data set' may in fact include information. Executives 'mine' for data in their corporate databases. What they seek is information, hidden in vast quantities of data.
Information usually denotes data, in a combined form used for some specific purpose.
So we speak of the database, from which the report is produced containing the information required. Further complexities are found when information is encoded. What looks like 'data' as I have just defined could in fact be information, as described below. Despite the advent of the information age there is no clear and precise definition of information. Those definitions that have emerged, however, are remarkable in their underlying simplicity and potential scope of application.