The extraction of knowledge from structured and unstructured data — integrating statistics, computation, and domain expertise.

Data science raises questions of privacy, consent, inferential harm, the reproduction of historical bias through predictive models, and the conversion of human behavior into extractable value without corresponding accountability.

The Islamic tradition's concept of 'ilm (knowledge) as carrying moral obligation — that to know is to be responsible — applies directly to data science. The practitioner who can infer sensitive facts from innocuous data bears a burden of restraint that data availability alone does not resolve.