Fundamentals of data representation

Binary

A base-2 number system using 0s and 1s to represent values.

Nibble

A group of four bits or half a byte.

Byte

A unit of digital information consisting of 8 bits.

Kilobyte (KB)

1000 bytes or 2^10 bytes.

Megabyte (MB)

1000 kilobytes or 2^20 bytes.

Gigabyte (GB)

1000 megabytes or 2^30 bytes.

Terabyte (TB)

1000 gigabytes or 2^40 bytes.

Petabyte (PB)

1000 terabytes or 2^50 bytes.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange, an 8-bit character encoding standard.

Unicode

A character encoding standard using 16 or 32 bits to represent characters.

Pixel

The smallest element in a digital image, represented in binary.

Colour Depth

The number of bits used to represent the color of a pixel.

Sampling Rate

The number of samples taken per second in digitizing sound (measured in Hz).

Sampling Resolution

The number of bits used to represent each sample in digitizing sound.

Lossy Compression

Reducing file size by removing some data irreversibly.

Lossless Compression

Reducing file size without losing any data.

Huffman Coding

A lossless compression technique using binary trees to assign codes to data elements based on frequency.