Data Scale

The data scale of a parameter is given by the statistic attributes of the values.

• nominal: Unordered set (only = or != relations)
  Example: film titles.
• ordinal: Ordered set (=, !=, <, and > relations)
  Example: film ratings.
• discrete: Numeric range (Integer, arithmetic possible)
  Example:film year.
• continuous: Numeric range (Real/float numbers, arithmetic possible)
  Example: film length.
• binary: true or false (Boolean arithmetic)
  Example: film available.

Note: Other often used terms in relation to data types are qualitative, quantitative, and categorical. Whereas qualitative subsumes nominal and ordinal, quantitative subsumes discrete and continuous, and categorical might be nominal, ordinal, or discrete data.

Formal Properties	Scale Types
	ratio	interval	ordinal	nominal
category	yes	yes	yes	yes
magnitude	yes	yes	yes	no
equal internal	yes	yes	no	no
absolute zero	yes	no	no	no
Example	file size	time	activity level	file name

Source: [Zhang, 1996]

References

[Zhang, 1996] Zhang, J. 1996. A representational analysis of relational information displays. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 45, 1 (Jul. 1996), 59-74. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1996.0042