4.1.1 Organising Data

• Organising data


  Accessing data with minimal expenditure of time and effort
• As soon as we start to acquire data, we create a new problem of accessing that data with the minimal expenditure of time and effort
• This problem was solved long ago for books
• Books


  • You can quickly decide if a book will be useful without even opening it
  • Information such as the title and author, and occasionally a summary, are printed on the cover
  • A quick glance will tell you if the book is relevant
• Finding a fact or your favourite section of that book would be a long, difficult task if there was no organisation within the book itself
• Organisation within books


  1. Divided into sections and chapters

  2. Group related content into chunks

  3. Allow you to quickly find relevant material
• Navigation in books


  • Made easier by a table of contents listing chapters and sections
  • Individual words and concepts can be located using an index or glossary
• Organising books in bookshops and libraries


  1. Categorised into related categories and subcategories

  2. To make them easy to find and compare to one another
• Example categories for organising books


  • Fiction
  • Crime novels
  • British crime
  • Classic crime
  • Historical crime
  • Nordic crime
  • Danish crime novels
  • Icelandic crime novels
• Labelling, indexing and cataloguing information is not unique to books
• Similar schemes were developed long before computers were even dreamt of
• Examples of pre-computer information organisation schemes


  • Censuses
  • Registers of births and deaths
  • Electoral rolls
  • Manifests
  • Company ledgers
• Today, when we want to store large amounts of data we use a database