8. Knowledge examples

Example 2

Data

chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, strawberry, vanilla, vanilla, strawberry, vanilla, vanilla

Information - this is a list of flavour of ice cream sales yesterday.

The data now has some context and so make sense. A bit of analysis is useful to glean more information.

For example, the most popular flavour of ice cream sold yesterday is vanilla.

Knowledge

The shop manager can see that vanilla is the most popular ice-cream flavour. Next time he places an order, he will ask for five times as much vanilla ice-cream than chocolate ice-cream.

Example 3

Data

14-05-08, 09-10-08, 21-11-08, 09-09-08, 31-07-08

Information - these are a list of dates in dd/mm/yy format. They are booked dates for a holiday cottage.

Now that the format of the data is known, it can be processed further. For example, they could be sorted into time order

The dates are sorted into order:

• 14th May 2008
• 31st July 2008
• 9th September 2008
• 9th October 2008
• 21st November 2008

Knowledge

The owner of the holiday cottage can see that it has hardly been rented over the summer period. She might decide to lower her rental price in order to get extra bookings.