manyoso pointed me to the word "infon". googling this term reveals that "[an] infon may be thought of as a discrete item of information" or that it can be defined as "a piece of information, possibly made up of other pieces of information, which meets the needs of a user at a given time". bingo. manyoso gets a cookie, and i get a word to use that people other than me might recognize right away ;-)
i still think monaform has more style, but this isn't exactly a parisian catwalk.
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Hummmm, wasn't the word data the plural for datum in latin?
See here:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/data.htmlor here:
http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/DATA
or here also :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataJust thought there is no need for a new word, when there is already one that is so old :)
I am portuguese, and the translation of the latim "data" is "dados", a plural word, that is the past participle of "dar" in portuguese, or "dare" in latin.
The portuguese/latin words "dar"/"dare" are the infinitives of "to give".
What I am saying is, that to me, a native speaker of a language that is a direct descendant of latin, it would seem odd to make a new singular form for "dados"/"data", as there is already one: "dado"/"datum".
I would would be surprised the the spanish and italian words weren't also very similar to the portuguese ones.
Use the source/root luke.
i was looking for a one-word description for a unit of information/data. the challenge was that "data", much like "information", is a mass plural. saying "one datum, two data" just doesn't sound right. one could say "one piece of data" or "two sets of data" but what's the name for a "piece of data" or a "set of data"? which is where infon comes in.
Shure, you just say, "one datum" or "a datum" for singular, and "data" for plural, no article, _because_ it is a mass noun.
One peace of data is a datum, and two sets of data is data. The name for a piece of data is a datum. One datum, two data, three data, etc, etc.
Although somewhat related, datum and infon are not the same thing. A datum is a unit of data, an infon is a unit of information. For instance, a phonebook is composed of many infons, each phonebook entry is an infon. "9534534534" is a datum that may be recorded in some phonebook in the world, so it may alone, or together with some other data be part of an infon, and be considered useful information.
Try reading this out lout 2000000 times :)
"I have furniture"
"I have a new datum"
"I have new data"
Quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun"The word "data" is often used as a mass noun, especially by people who work with computers. In formal writing it retains its original grammatical role as the plural of "datum"."
So I say, if you want the singular form of data, use datum, if you want to classify a piece of information (collect/processed/categorised/contextualised data) call it an infon.
Just my €0,02
And just to be picky/ier :)
A single piece of data is often referred to as a data point.
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