The Role of Data in Today's Digital World
The Role of Data in Today's Digital World 관련
These days, every action we take on the internet leaves behind a trail of information or data - whether it's conducting a bank transaction or shopping online.
But you may sometimes wonder whether it actually makes sense for these digital actions to be recorded. Do we need records of keystrokes when using a keyboard app, images saved in a gallery app, files in a file management program, notes saved in a note-taking app, or even vehicle routes with integrated Android Auto technology?
Some of these actions may not seem particularly useful at first, but they help developers and designers provide better, more advanced, and efficient services to users.
For instance, understanding how a user types on a keyboard app can improve the real-time typing experience by adapting the internal dictionary to the user's typing style and correcting errors more effectively. It also improves gesture typing, a feature based on artificial intelligence techniques that requires a large number of examples to be deployed successfully on a product.
Similarly, simple images saved in a gallery may not seem significant enough to be recorded on external sites, or even registered at all.
Image files, for example, can contain EXIF metadata with information about the image, such as the location where it was captured, the date of creation, its resolution, orientation, and the camera model used - among other data. While a user may not be interested in this data, it serves as the foundation for various application services, including classifying images into albums based on location, creating visual timelines, and generating "memories." These features significantly enhance the user experience.
Besides metadata, the content of images also creates a "digital trail" on third-party servers, which might initially seem intrusive and not beneficial to the user. However, it can lead to enhanced services. Since these third parties have the resources to train large machine learning models, they can recognize objects and faces in images. This improves album classification and allows users to search through images using text. Third parties can also identify which people or items are in a photo and link their data with other services.
Regarding the data generated by smart vehicles or IoT devices in general, the purpose is fundamentally the same: to provide users with better services, such as route optimization, maintenance prediction, prevention of possible failures, driving assistance, and integration with other smart devices in the environment.
These features are implemented using artificial intelligence techniques that learn from examples. Typically, the more data available, the better the underlying models "learn," leading to better results.
Ultimately, regardless of the legal and privacy issues related to these practices, recording what we do is not an end in itself. Rather, it’s a means of turning scattered information into useful knowledge, which can then be used to create services that enhance our productivity or user experience.
One clear example of this is in this very article on the Hashnode platform. It provides writers with translation, rewriting, and keyword optimization services for SEO searches, all of which are based on artificial intelligence models that have been trained using large amounts of text - that is, data.
So to make sure this is all technically feasible, we had to develop specific techniques for collecting, storing, and managing information securely, efficiently, and consistently.
- Collection involves capturing information from various sources, such as IoT sensors, mobile devices, and social interactions, either manually or automatically.
- This information can then be stored and accessed again when we need to transform it or apply processes that improve query efficiency or reduce storage space. This is precisely why data compression is a critical aspect of data storage.
- Lastly, data management involves organizational, protective, governance, and analytical tasks.
In this book, we will focus on storage, which is the key aspect handled by databases. But databases are used for more than just storing and accessing data, as we will see later. They also provide a set of functionalities that allow us to organize, protect, and ensure the integrity of data, as well as to query it efficiently and concurrently.
This makes databases a fundamental component of the infrastructure for these services, which are often offered to a large number of users.
More precisely, we will focus on explaining all the necessary theoretical concepts you need to know to design and maintain a database. There are many ways to store data, depending on its nature or the client's needs, but we will focus on one specific structure.
To grasp the fundamentals of storing and managing data, we should begin with the most straightforward cases, which involve the simplest possible data structures. You’ll also learn the SQL language and its relevance to database maintenance through examples.