In general, data is any set of characters that has been gathered and translated for some purpose, usually analysis. It can be any character, including text and numbers, pictures, sound, or video. If data is not put into context, it doesn't do anything to a human or computer.
Within a computer's storage, data is a collection of numbers represented as bytes that are in turn composed of bits (binary digits) that can have the value one or zero. Data is processed by the CPU, which uses logical operations to produce new data (output) from source data (input).
types of data