ORGANIZATION OF DATA

Data for a computer can be organized in several different ways. One unit of data is called a field. An example of a field may be a person's name. Several individual fields, such as a field for an individual's name, a field for nationality, and a field for the language a particular student's speak, can be combined together to form a record. A record, therefore, is a group of fields related to a particular unit of information. Record, like fields, can be combined together into a related group. A group of related records is called a file. A student information file may consist of individual records. Each containing a name, nationality, and language field. Data can also be organized into a very large collections called data bases. Each data base is a collections of related items which is organized so that it can be used for different purpose. For example, a data base containing information about an individual student's name, nationality, and language, like the one describe above, could be used both to determine the number of students from a particular country and to classify students according to the language each individual speaks.