The word 'data' is Latin for "that which has been given" and the word 'information' is an English word, derived from Latin, for that which informs. But the word 'sign' is the general term that includes signs from any source for any purpose. It includes all the signs that have been given (the data) and all the signs that have been used to inform (the information), and all the signs that any living thing from bacteria on up receive, perceive, process, generate, store, and communicate.

AA: Data denotes the information conveyed in the sign, symbol or signal. Data could be coded and represented, measured and reported, analyzed and visualized, collected and stored, processed and communicated. As a general concept, it could cover information and knowledge, facts and statistics, values and variables, patterns and rules.

No. The word 'data' is more specialized than the word 'sign'. It does not include knowledge, since knowledge represents signs that are known. And the signs of knowledge may have been derived directly from perception (a process of interpreting signs derived by the senses). The signs of knowledge may have been given by somebody as information, but more likely some sentient being obtained them through an interpretation of signs from the sense organs. (And sentient beings include everything from bacteria on up.) Viruses are not sentient beings. They are signs that are interpreted by the cells of living things.)

AA: data is the new oil and gas, money and and any valuable assets of the digital age

There is nothing new about data, since computing devices have been given data since the punched card machines that processed the 1890 census. The amount of data has been growing exponentially for the past 140 years. That exp9nential increase has made a qualitative increase in the kinds of ways that machines can process the data.

But it's important to remember that the human brain has about 90 billion neurons, and each neuron can store an immense amount of bits internally and can be connected to a large number of other neurons in a large variety of ways. The product of all those numbers is immense compared to the WWW.

Neuroscientists are just beginning to explore the potential for representing and processing that immensity. Today's computer system are just beginning to catch up with the storage capacity of a small animal brain, but the current computational mechanisms are primitive compared to the complex connectivity of the neurons and their interconnections in the brain of a fruit fly.

As for ontology, I strongly recommend sli de 30 of http://jfsowa.com/talks/patolog4.pdf (and the other slides before and after plus all the references in the slides and at the end).

John