For the purpose of this paper the author uses a technical definition of the term data, whereby
it comprises facts, numbers or text that can be processed by a computer. It includes: i.
operational or transactional data such as sales, costs, inventory, payroll and accounting; ii.
non-operational data, such as forecast data and macro-economic data; iii. meta data or data
about data itself, such as a logical database design and data dictionary definitions.