Structure and Representation of Data

• Data is specific to a particular domain or application
• A datum has one or more components (scalar, vector, tensor), possibly with geometric/structural attributes (location, connectivity)
• Each component may be nominal or ordinal, discrete or continuous
• Each component may be ordered, may have distance relationship, may have absolute zero (mathematicians call this scale)
• The location attribute is relevant only for data from a physical domain, and may be on a regular or irregular grid
• The connectivity of data specifies the neighborhood relationship among data points, and is used for resampling or interpolation

• Examples