In anguish, the people invented an entire new profession - Data Mining - that essentially 'crushed' the data stores creating gravel composed of individual datums and put the result in a different, more malleable matrix — live gravel in cement and sand and water (before the matrix dries). From this new medium the people would pluck bits of gravel and place them next to each other an proclaim, "Look! Information!"
That’s a funny story, but it overlooks the fact that sometimes all there is, is bits of gravel. Like 3 billion base pairs of the human genome. There’s no “teenage clerk” that has looked at most of it in detail or has much of any intuition about what it does. Similarly, there’s no Rosetta stone for the nuances of why different whale species vocalize one way or another. It’s just a process of throwing ideas against the wall and see if they stick. Computers can do that more rapidly than humans can, at least. Data mining isn’t just for developers in industry that can’t figure out how to decompose tables or make indices. There are many approaches to modeling information, database normalization is one of many. Information and category theory contribute other approaches. Marcus
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