Spectrum Management

"The More we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world".- Vint Cerf

Data and It's Importance:

Data is a collection of facts (numbers, words, measurements, observations etc) that has been translated into a form that computers can process. As human beings, we are limited in our capacity to remember things. Having tools that allow immediate access and analysis of data enables us to make better decisions. Today, we have systems that allow a doctor to review the patient's medical record before prescribing a new drug.

Whichever industry you work in, or whatever your interests, you will almost certainly have come across a story about how "data" is changing the face of our world. It might be part of a study helping to cure a disease, boost a company's revenue, make a building more efficient or be responsible for those targeted ads you keep seeing.

In general, data is simply another word for information. But in computing and business, data refers to information that is machine-readable as opposed to human-readable.

Human Vs Machine:

Human-readable (also called as unstructured data) refers to information that can interpret and study by humans only, such as an image and meaning of a block of text. Machine-readable (also called structured data) refers to information that computer programs can process. A program is a set of instructions for manipulating data. And when we take data and apply a set of programs, we get software. In order for a program to perform instructions on data, that must have some kind of uniform structure.

Types of Structured Data:

Personal Data:

Personal Data is anything that is specific to you. It covers your demographics, your location, your email address and other identifying factors. It's usually in the news when it gets leaked or is being used in a controversial way. 

Lots of different companies collect your personal data, anytime you have to put in your email address or credit card details you are giving away your personal data. Often they'll use that data to provide you with personalized suggestions to keep you engaged. Facebook for example uses your personal information to suggest content you might like to see based on other people similar to you like.

In addition, personal data is aggregated and then sold to other companies, mostly for advertising and competitive research purposes. That's one of the ways you get targeted ads and content from companies you've never even heard of.

Transactional  Data:

Transctional Data is anything that requires an action to collect. You might click on an ad, make a purchase, visit a certain web page etc. Every website you visit collects transactional data of some kind, either through Google Analytics, another 3rd party system or their own internal data capture system.

Transactional data is incredibly important for businesses because it helps them to expose variability and optimize their operations for the highest quality results. By examining large amounts of data, it is possible to uncover hidden patterns and correlations. These patterns can create competitive advantages, and result in business benefits like more effective marketing and increased revenue.

Web Data:

Web data is a collective term which refers to any type of data you might pull from the internet, whether to study for research purposes or otherwise. That might be data on what your competitors are selling, published government data, football scores etc. It's catchall for anything you can find on the web that is public facing ( i.e. not stored in some internal database). Studying this data can be very informative especially when communicated well to management.

Web data is important because it's one of the major ways businesses can access information that isn't generated by themselves.When creating quality business models and making important BI decisions, businesses need information on what is happening internally and externally within their organization and what is happening in the wider market.

Web data can be used to monitor competitors, track potential customers, keep track of channel partners, generated leads, build apps, and much more. It’s uses are still being discovered as the technology for turning unstructured data into structured data improves.

Web data can be collected by writing web scrapers to collect it, using a scraping tool, or by paying a third party to do the scraping for you. A web scraper is a computer program that takes a URL as an input and pulls the data out in a structured format – usually a JSON feed or CSV.

Sensor Data:

Sensor data is produced by objects and is often referred to as the Internet of Things. It covers everything from your smartwatch measuring your heart rate to a building with external sensors that measure the weather.