a data item is an information content entity that is intended to be a truthful statement about something (modulo, e.g., measurement precision or other systematic errors) and is constructed/acquired by a method which reliably tends to produce (approximately) truthful statements.
Term information
2014-03-31: See discussion at http://odontomachus.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/aboutness-objects-propositions/
JAR: datum -- well, this will be very tricky to define, but maybe some information-like stuff that might be put into a computer and that is meant, by someone, to denote and/or to be interpreted by some process... I would include lists, tables, sentences... I think I might defer to Barry, or to Brian Cantwell Smith JAR: A data item is an approximately justified approximately true approximate belief
2009-03-16: removed datum as alternative term as datum specifically refers to singular form, and is thus not an exact synonym.
2009-03-16: data item deliberatly ambiguous: we merged data set and datum to be one entity, not knowing how to define singular versus plural. So data item is more general than datum.
2/2/2009 Alan and Bjoern discussing FACS run output data. This is a data item because it is about the cell population. Each element records an event and is typically further composed a set of measurment data items that record the fluorescent intensity stimulated by one of the lasers.
Data items include counts of things, analyte concentrations, and statistical summaries.