what is data

Data describes a real-world information resource that is important to your application. Data describes the things, people, products, items, customers, assets, records, and — ultimately — data structures that your application finds useful to categorize, organize, and maintain.

Identifying data is an iterative process. At first you may just know some vague, high-level details about how the application must handle its information. As you keep expanding your knowledge of the application's intended business processes, you continue filling in more details.