ITM 207 Chapter 3: ITM207 Chapter 3.docx

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Information Technology Management
• Course: ITM 207
• Professor: Youcef Derbal

Document Summary

Chapter 3 data representation: nowadays, computers are truly multimedia devices, which deal with several different media types. These include: numbers, text, audio, images and graphics, video. Ultimately however, all of this data is stored as binary digits. Each document is somehow represented as strings of 1s and 0s: data compression is reducing the amount of space needed to store a piece of data. In the best we needed to keep data small because of storage limitations, but today it is shrunk to share it with others on the web: the web and networks have an inherent bandwidth restriction. Bandwidth is the number of bits or bytes that can be transmitted from one place to another in a fixed amount of time: the compression ratio gives us an indication of how much compression occurs. The compression ratio is the size of the compressed data, divided by the size of the original data.