You have been selected for admission into the Who’s Who in IT Professionals and have been invited to speak at a conference in Las Vegas. As a key note speaker on the topic of “The future of data encoding and compression,” you have been asked to discuss the effect that cheaper storage, higher volume storage, higher bandwidth, and faster processing will have on current methods of data encoding and compression. Your audience will be comprised of both IT and non-IT professionals, so you will need to explain the basic principles of data encoding and compression as well as forecast the future effect that new technologies will have on them.

 

Please describe and discuss the following in a 5-6 page APA formatted paper:

• What is data encoding?
• What is data compression?
• How do they support today’s data storage needs?
• Forecast if technology advancements in storage, bandwidth, and processing speeds will effect current methods of data encoding and compression.

 

Grading Criteria:

 

Data compression: Storing data can take up a lot of space, and this fact creates the next challenge for computer scientists to overcome. Storage media can be expensive, and the ability to have quick access to your data while also having the vast amount of storage space to store all of your data can be a challenge. Computer scientists have addressed this problem by creating a process of compressing data.

 

Data encoding: Data encoding occurs when a computer storage device takes the electrical signal generated from the creation of data and then converts it to a form that can be stored. To understand this process, you must understand how information is stored on a magnetic storage medium. Of course, there are many mediums in use today, but magnetic is the most commonly used and a good point to begin your understanding of data encoding. Computer data exist in the form of binary 1’s and 0’s that are sent to a magnetic recording head in the system’s hard drive storage medium. The head creates magnetic sectors on the storage device with specific polarities corresponding to the positive and negative that the drive applies to the head. Boundaries are created using flux reversals between the positive and negative polarities that the drive uses to encode the data onto the hard drive platter. This is the process in which data is stored electronically. When the data is retrieved for use, each flux reversal that the drive detects generates a positive or negative pulse that is used to reconstruct the original binary data.

 

It is reasonable to expect that changes in technology will drive new forms of data encoding and compression, and existing methods will eventually phase out as new methods are introduced. The drive to do more with less is the single thought process behind this change. That is to say, to gain more storage with less of a physical medium that has a smaller energy footprint.