The Enigma

Information & Data

The Enigma is a cipher device that was extensively used by German military to communicate secret messages during World War II. This enabled the Germans to use radio communication for command and co-ordination. All the plans and commands were freely floating in the air for anyone to listen in. The only thing that the British did not have was the machine settings for cipher that changed everyday. Without the key there were about 159000000000000000000 (yes that is 159 followed by 18 zeros) possible combination for each code.

I couldn't possibly find a better example of difference between data and information - which I stumbled upon as I watched a movie last night.

The British had all the Data but it was not Information.

Like a key is needed to unlock an encrypted code, metadata is required to unlock the power of data. It is impossible to understand the data without knowing what the attributes represent.

Information = Data + MetaData + Quality

Metadata provides context to the data and Quality provides the trust quotient.

Logical Models

Think of a hypothetical scenario where you have customers, accounts, sales executives and orders

Unless you understand what roles sale executives mean there is limited value to this data. Unless you understand what are the different roles that sales executives can play and how to link an order to a customer, you cannot run any meaningful analytics on this data. Logical models solve this problem by defining entities/concepts and relationship between concepts. In this example, the logical model tell that the relationship between Customer and Sales executive can be many to many

Without the Logical or Conceptual model you can stumble through the data and might be able to uncover relationships. But not only this is time consuming and expensive exercise, its error prone. You can never be sure if you have correct or complete picture. There is no reference for you to validate assumptions. Sometimes the pieces of the puzzle fit in perfectly and seem to make sense but only until you look at the big picture.

Data model is like that picture on the puzzle box that gives you the big picture so you can fix the puzzle pieces and map it to the vision of the creator of the picture.