All articles starting with D

Data (Star Trek)

Data (Star Trek): Soong-type android with a positronic brain, created by Dr. Noonian Soong, activated 2335 at Omicron Theta; portrayed by Brent Spiner in TNG and films; sought humanity, won personhood in "The Measure of a Man," died in Nemesis, returned in Picard.

Data (Use and Access) Act 2025

The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 is a United Kingdom act reforming data protection law and regulating digital verification, Smart Data schemes, and automated decisions.

Data access object

The data access object (DAO) pattern is a software design pattern in which an object provides an abstract interface for reading and writing a data source.

Data acquisition

Data acquisition, also known as signal acquisition, is the process of sampling signals from physical phenomena and converting them into digital data for storage, analysis, and control.

Data age and temporal mixture effects

Data age and temporal mixture effects describe how the age of a language model's pretraining data affects its performance, degrading about 2.8 points per year of misalignment.

Data analysis

Data analysis is the process of examining, transforming, and interpreting data to answer questions and extract usable information, using statistical and logical techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data.

Data analyst

Data analyst: professional who collects, cleans, models and communicates data to support decisions; also called junior or departmental analyst. UK Level 4 standard, four government role levels, £28,000 to £65,000 pay, SQL and visualisation core skills.

Data and Reality

Data and Reality (1978) by William Kent, subtitled Basic Assumptions in Data Processing Reconsidered, is a classic data modeling book arguing data structures are imperfect maps of reality; reissued in 2012 with Steve Hoberman.

Data and safety monitoring board

A data and safety monitoring board (DSMB), or data monitoring committee, is an independent committee that reviews clinical trial data and recommends continuing, modifying, or stopping the trial.

Data annotation

Data annotation is the process of attaching human labels to images, text, audio, or video so machine learning models can be trained and tested against it.

Data anonymization

Data anonymization is the processing of personal data so individuals can no longer be identified, even with other reasonably available information; it is the strictest form of de-identification.

Data architect

Data architect: senior IT role defining an organization's data policies, models, and technologies; distinct from data engineer; spans EDW, data lake, and cloud/AI architectures; US average pay about $135,377 (2024).

Data architecture

Data architecture: the design discipline defining how organizations collect, store, transform, and govern data. Also spans data warehouse, lake, lakehouse, mesh, and fabric patterns; evolves from EDW to active-metadata and AI-native designs.

data Artisans

data Artisans was a Berlin-based startup founded in 2014 by the creators of Apache Flink to commercialize the open-source streaming engine, acquired by Alibaba in January 2019 for a reported €90 million.

Sep 29, 2026

Data assimilation

Data assimilation is a family of numerical methods that combine observations with numerical model forecasts to estimate the evolving state of systems such as the atmosphere or ocean.

Data at rest

Data at rest is stationary data on persistent storage like databases, file shares, backups, and cloud buckets, one of three data states alongside data in transit and data in use.

Data augmentation algorithm

The data augmentation algorithm is a Markov chain Monte Carlo method for Bayesian computation introduced by Martin A. Tanner and Wing Hung Wong in 1987.

Data breach

A data breach is an event in which protected data is accessed or disclosed by someone not authorized, ranging from a lost laptop to ransomware campaigns.

Data breach notification law

A data breach notification law is a statute requiring organizations to notify individuals, and often regulators, when a breach compromises personal data, first enacted in California in 2003.

Data buffer

A data buffer, also called packet buffering or buffer memory, is a region of memory holding data temporarily while it moves, bridging speed and timing differences.

Data catalog

Data catalog: a searchable inventory of an organization's data assets, built from metadata such as ownership, lineage, glossary, and classifications, that supports discovery and governance; it stores metadata, not the data itself. In lakehouses, the term also names the technical metastore (Hive Metastore, Glue, Unity Catalog, Polaris).

Data Catalog Vocabulary

Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) is a W3C RDF standard, namespace http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat#, for describing datasets, data services, and catalogs for interoperability. Current DCAT 3 (22 August 2024) adds versioning, DatasetSeries, and checksums; profiles include DCAT-AP and DCAT-US.

Data center

A data center is a building housing computers, storage, and networking equipment with supporting power, cooling, and security systems, providing centralized data processing for organizations.

Data center bridging

Data center bridging (DCB) is a set of IEEE 802.1 standards that lets LAN and storage traffic share one largely lossless Ethernet fabric in data centers.

Data center infrastructure management

Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) is a category of integrated software combining real-time monitoring of data center power, cooling, and assets with capacity planning, workflow management, and reporting.

Data classification

Data classification assigns persistent sensitivity labels to data assets so protection controls can be applied proportionately; typical frameworks use 3-5 levels (Public, Internal, Confidential, Restricted), anchored in ISO/IEC 27001 A.5.12, CIS Safeguard 3.7, and national standards such as China's GB/T 43697-2024.

Data clean room

A data clean room (DCR) is privacy-controlled software where multiple companies match and analyze first-party data without exposing raw records, using PETs like PSI, SMPC, and differential privacy; pioneered by Google Ads Data Hub in 2017 for advertising measurement.