What is Data Science?

Data science is the study dedicated to extracting insights from data in all its forms, such as images, sound, and text.

Data analysis is the field of extracting value from data and generating solutions from the data.

Data scientists are people with the knowledge, facts, information, and skills needed to work with the data. The work can include generating, collecting, processing, analyzing, and interpreting the data.

The field of data science is not new, but the term to describe it has evolved. In 1962, John Tukey, a mathematician at Bell Labs, used “data analysis” as a way to describe the unrecognized science. Later, in 2001, William Cleveland, a statistician at Bell Labs, rephrased "data analysis" as “data science.”

In the current world of connectivity, the amount of gathered data is a new phenomenon. For example, data science can be the triumvirate of math, statistics, and computing unmeasurable amounts of digitized data combined with specific knowledge of climate, education, poverty, and more. The combination makes it possible to address issues such as economic and social problems and to form resolutions.

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) defines data science as the science of planning for, acquisition, management, analysis of, and inference of data.

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines data science as the "interdisciplinary field of inquiry in which quantitative and analytical approaches, processes, and systems are developed and used to extract knowledge and insights from increasingly large and/or complex sets of data."