
Writing a data management plan: What are Research data?
Unlike other types of information, research data are collected, observed, or created for the purposes of analysis to produce and validate original research results.
Data may be viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which information and knowledge are derived.
However the word “data” means different things to different people in different contexts. Different disciplines have and use discipline-specific language around the subject research data.
Some people refer to everything digital as “data”. Others refer to both analogue and digital materials as 'data'.
For the purposes of this module research data shall be regarded as that created in a digital form ("born digital") or converted to a digital form (digitised).