Data is potential information, knowledge, understanding. 

Data reflects nature's glory and the designs of people.  

Data sampled, resampled, jackknifed and bootstrapped to within an inch of its life; validated data and cross-validated data; data past and present; data yet to come. Data observed, imputed, missing; repeated, longitudinal, functional; balanced, blocked, split and plotted; hierarchical, spatial, temporal; sequential, batched and aligned; rounded, truncated, censored; univariate and multivariate; continuous, discrete and mixed; nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio; skewed, kurtotic and bimodal; bounded above, bounded below and unbounded; data in all its inglorious and messy variety. Binary, binomial, Bernoulli; Poisson, negative binomial and overdispersed; count, counted, uncounted and uncountable; designed, recalcitrant and irrelevant.  

Data tables, data definitions, data procedures.  Qualitative and quantitative. Data driven, data driving and driving miss data; data mined, data mining and mining data if you don't mind; data structures and structured data. Directional and spherical; published and unpublished; structural and unstructured; data quality and quality data; test data, tests of data and tested data; edited data, data edit, data edits and data editor; data entry and entry level data analysts; data dependent and dependent data; BIG data and small or no data; all the data, population data, random data and randomized data, randomly sampled, stratified and nested; data life and lifetime data; data splits and banana splits and liddle lamzy divey; raw data and sushi; study data and studies of data, prediction and retrodiction; entered, warehoused, filed, sharpened, fitted; modeling data and data modeling; data models and model data, data with p bigger than n and data with n bigger than p; data going to infinity (and beyond) and data going nowhere (just for show); data collection and collections of data; data symposiums, data workshops and data repositories; class data, data classes, classified data and data classifications.  

What is Data?  

Data is a character on Star Trek.