In today’s competitive business environment, the data plays an important role in defining the business strategies. Data is used for forecasting as well as taking important business decisions. Organizations which are paying more attention to ensure high quality and accurate data have a competitive edge in the business. This is the reason, various companies which provide data entry, data mining, data capturing, data cleansing and data enrichment services, with the sole purpose of ensuring that the data that is used for making business decisions is as accurate as possible. Two terms, data mining and data capturing, have been used extensively everywhere. Oftentimes you will find that people use both terms interchangeably. However, there are some intrinsic differences in both processes.
What is data capturing?
Every business on its normal working day processes numerous amounts of data. This data from different file formats is collected from different sources, whether it is the written data, typed data, data collected from business records, from customer’s record etc, and is then changed from hard copy to soft copy using various software for making it readable and usable on computer, this process is called data capturing.
What is data mining?
In simple terms, data mining is the process of extraction of usable information from a give data set and transforming that information into structures and patterns that can be used for analytics purposes. Though the name of the process suggests that it is extraction or mining of the data, therefore, it is normal to get confused. However, the name is the misnomer. The process is not about mining the data itself, but about mining the information from the huge set of data for practical purposes. Data in itself has no meaning if it cannot be further used for analytics. The process of data mining ensures that the extracted data can be used for organizational purposes of forecasting and making business decisions.
Difference between data mining and data capturing
As you can see, data mining and data capturing is not two terms that can be used interchangeably. Data capturing is merely collecting huge amount of data from various sources and in various formats and making it useable by changing its form to a computer readable format, with the help of various software programs, that are specifically designed for the purpose. In cases, such as handwritings, where the software have limited capability, manual data entry is used. Data mining on the other hand, is the process of extracting useful information and pattern from this captured data and changing it in structures that can be used for analytics purposes.
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