FCSCST1133Data Engineering Ecosystem

SCST1133 · Topic 01

Digital Data Representation

See how text, numbers, images, audio and video become data that computers can process and store.

01Introduction to Computer and System
Data foundation

Digital Data Representation

See how text, numbers, images, audio and video become data that computers can process and store.

Digital content converted through encoding into bits, files and storage
Figure 19. Encoding and file formats organise different content as binary data.

Core concepts

ConceptMeaningExample
BitA binary value: 0 or 1One state in digital representation
ByteA group of eight bitsA basic unit of storage
EncodingRules for representing informationUTF-8 text encoding
File formatA defined structure for stored dataCSV, JPEG, MP3 or MP4
MetadataInformation describing dataFile type, size and creation time

Data engineering connection: File format, encoding and metadata affect how data is ingested, validated, transformed and exchanged.