Information is an expression for what we want to remember. Data is how we have realized this through storing it in a certain way.
Information and data are words which are commonly used when it comes to working with different transition projects.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is about protecting the personal integrity aiming to regulate how companies and organizations handles personal data. Let us use this as an example to clarify the difference between information and data.
Persons can either be legal or physical. A legal person is a business which is given an identity in order to be able to act as an independent entity. A physical person is an actual human being. Let us focus on the physical person.
When we want to describe a person, there are many sides and aspects which could be clarified: physical traits, family relations, interests, health status, life history etc.
When we need a certain aspect of a person, we start from talking about the personal information. It could be very different things but the guideline is to look for what is about that person that is relevant to know for a certain business. For example, the company PostNord is more interested in postal delivery addresses, while the tax office is more interested in income of service and capital gain (and even the registered address). The child care department of the local authority collects information about children and their needs, while The Swedish National Land Survey (Lantmäteriet) registers information about who owns a certain property.
It is the need that determines which information should be described. In order to make it more precise, it is described in terms of attributes: what exactly is it that we want to know?
For PostNord, the personal information is what stands on the door or mailbox as well as the names (First Name, Middle Name and Surname) for all the persons who live at the same address. They want to be able to keep the history of multiple addresses over time so that they could use it for forwarding mail.
The personal information is transformed to data at the same moment that we start to talk about how we should store the information. Each mailman has a file where the pages are ordered based on the route that the post is sent through. That file is full of data.
Forwarding register which could be data-based is full of data. Data is those fields, field types and lengths which were chosen when the label card and forwarding blanket were designed. The information was the requirement for what is to be remembered. Data is what we can actually use and sometimes does not lead to what is expected to be achieved.
Links
This is how to avoid getting drawned in the sea of information/data (arway.se)