Information is the context with which data is made relevant, important, and able to have meaningful actions associated with it. If data are the raw ingredients–the information is the completed recipe.
An example of information would be a report generated from an application that ingests raw sensor values related to weather conditions. In this case, the signal, a mechanistic truth reflective of the physical state of the environment, is used to provide an interpretation–the information.
Another example of information would be the interpretation of a byte stream using a specific encoding. A stream of 1’s and 0’s are ultimately meaningless unless one uses a system of interpretation known to all parties of meaningful involvement. For example, 10010010 is a meaningless series of symbols. However, when interpreted as base2 (binary) numeric representation–it is information representative of the number 142.
