2.1.1 What are data?

‘Data’ refers to any observation or set of observations or measurements that represent attributes about an entity, also referred to as a data unit. There is no consensus over whether the word ‘data’ itself is singular or plural; in this module we use the convention that it is plural. The singular is actually ‘datum’, but this lexis is increasingly rarely used today.

You may be most familiar with the idea of ‘data’ being represented in numbers, but data can be expressed in many different ways, such as characters, words, images, and even sounds and videos. For example, the class of antibiotics known as ‘cephalosporins’ can be represented as a word written into a hospital record (‘cephalosporin’), as a set of characters (the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) code J01D, which defines its therapeutic indication), as a schematic 2D chemical structure, or the word might be spoken by a medical practitioner during an interview about antimicrobial prescribing practices. All of these constitute data.

In the case of AMR/AMU data, the entity or data unit can be an individual person or animal, a bacterial pathogen, a health facility or farm, or a country, depending on the purpose of data measurement.