All articles starting with D

Data Comm

Data Comm is a Federal Aviation Administration program that lets controllers and pilots exchange air traffic control information digitally, a key part of the NextGen modernization effort.

Data compression

Data compression, also called file compression or bit-rate reduction, represents digital information with fewer bits, either losslessly, as in gzip, or lossily, as in JPEG.

Data contamination and decontamination

Data contamination is the leakage of benchmark test information into a language model's training data, inflating scores by roughly 6% to 40%; decontamination filters it from corpora before training.

Data contract: a machine-readable producer-consumer agreement defining a dataset's schema, semantics, quality, SLAs, and ownership, enforced via CI/CD and schema registries; also the legal term for data-sharing contracts under the EU Data Act. Main standard is the Linux Foundation Bitol ODCS YAML format.

Data Contract Specification

Data Contract Specification (DCS), a MIT-licensed YAML format by Jochen Christ and Simon Harrer for describing data structure, quality, and service levels; deprecated 2025 in favor of the Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS).

Data Contracts (book)

Data Contracts (book) refers chiefly to Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, Andrew Jones's 2023 Packt book defining the data contract pattern he coined at GoCardless in 2021; a second 2025 O'Reilly book by Sanderson and colleagues also covers the topic.

Sep 19, 2026

Data Conversion, Inc

Data Conversion, Inc (DCI) was a Massachusetts software-services company founded by Narendra Patni in 1972, converting paper documents to computer-readable data with keypunching done in India.

Data curation pipelines for foundation models

A data curation pipeline for foundation models turns raw web crawls into a pretraining corpus through text extraction, quality filtering, deduplication, and data mixing, with corpus choices measurably changing model performance.

Data custodian

Data custodian: the technical-implementer role in data governance, executing access controls, backups, security, and retention set by the data owner or steward; also an agency-level role in Australian statistical practice.

Data Darbar

Data Darbar (داتا دربار) is Lahore's Sufi shrine of Ali Hujwiri, Data Ganj Bakhsh, Pakistan's largest shrine, drawing 40,000-60,000 daily visitors and up to one million at its annual Urs.

Data deduplication

Data deduplication is a storage-efficiency technique that identifies duplicate data by hash fingerprint and keeps one physical copy, reducing backup workloads to about 1/10 to 1/30 of their size.

Data definition language

Data definition language, also called data description language, is the category of SQL statements that define database structure through CREATE, ALTER, and DROP, unlike data manipulation language.

Data dictionary

A data dictionary, also called a system catalog, is a centralized repository describing a database's data elements, recording their names, types, formats, constraints, relationships, meanings, and usage.

Data diffing

Data diffing: value-level comparison of two dataset versions or tables, reporting added, removed, and changed rows by key; used for migration validation, distinct from delta-encoding differencing algorithms.

Data discovery

Data discovery: finding, evaluating, and exploring data from disparate sources in enterprises and research. Covers profiling, metadata, catalogs, FAIR discoverability, and why keyword search limits dataset discovery.

Data Distribution Service

Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a middleware standard from the Object Management Group for data-centric publish-subscribe communication, used in defense, finance, automotive, and robotics, including ROS 2.

Data Documentation Initiative

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international metadata standard for describing social, behavioral, and other scientific data, maintained by the DDI Alliance and begun in 1995 as an effort to standardize codebook documentation.

Data dredging

Data dredging, also called p-hacking or data fishing, is the practice of testing many variable relationships until a significant result appears, then reporting it without disclosure.

Data East (データイースト株式会社)

Data East (データイースト株式会社), also called DECO, was a Japanese arcade game developer founded by Tetsu Fukuda in 1976, known for BurgerTime, Karate Champ, the DECO Cassette System, and bankruptcy in 2003 with rights going to G-mode.

Data Encryption Standard

The Data Encryption Standard, also known as the Data Encryption Algorithm, is a US federal block cipher adopted in 1977 and withdrawn in 2005 as insecure.

Data engineering

Data engineering: the computer science discipline designing and operating systems that collect, store, transform, and deliver data; outputs include pipelines, ETL/ELT, warehouses, and lakehouse storage for analytics and AI.

Data entry clerk

A data entry clerk, also called a data entry operator or data encoder, transfers information from source documents into digital systems, verifying entries and correcting errors.

Sep 29, 2026

Data envelopment analysis

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric linear-programming method measuring the relative efficiency of units such as firms, schools, or bank branches with multiple inputs and outputs.

Data execution prevention

Data execution prevention (DEP) is a Windows memory-protection feature, added in Windows XP SP2 in 2004, that stops attackers from executing code from the heap or stack.

Data exfiltration

Data exfiltration is the unauthorized transfer of data from a compromised system to an attacker, often over the command and control channel or cloud services.

Data fabric

A data fabric is a data management design that uses metadata, machine learning, and automation to connect data of any format and location, replacing custom point-to-point pipelines.

Data freshness

Data freshness measures how up-to-date data is: update frequency, or lag between a real-world event and queryability. Distinct from timeliness, accuracy, latency; enforced via data SLAs and observability freshness checks.

Sep 19, 2026

Data General Corporation

Data General Corporation was an American minicomputer manufacturer founded in 1968 by former Digital Equipment Corporation engineers, best known for its Nova line and acquired by EMC in 1999.

Data General Nova

The Data General Nova is a 16-bit minicomputer introduced by Data General in 1968 for under $10,000, the fastest minicomputer on the market for several years.