Where does data come from and where does it go? The first stage of the data life cycle is data generation. It’s also the first stage in the data engineering life cycle. Note that the data engineering life cycle is subset of the data life cycle.

Data Devices

A source system is the origin of the data. It could be an IoT system, a computer, a transactional database, an application message queue. It could be an IoT swarm. There are all kinds of other devices that can produce data including cell phones, tablets, video games, RFIDs, GPS, laptops and desktops, medical imaging and videos.

Data aggregators collect data from various sources. The government collects data from its census. Google collects data from the search terms people enter and publishes statistics on Google Trends. Market research companies do surveys and collect public opinions and political preferences. In reality, all businesses collect data.

The data can be structured or unstructured. Data can be digital or analog.