Let's say that one possesses some data or information that one wishes to map to some kind of numerical representation. I can't seem to come up with a word or phrase that describes it well.
As an example, it could be used when converting something like a date string ("2014-01-02"
) to a UNIX timestamp (1388620800
).
Generally, I would imagine such a word would be used when the data has some kind of inherent ordering, but perhaps isn't directly usable with other numbers. I thought of "quantize", but this seems to imply that the data is somehow discrete, i.e. not continuous, which would (arguably) be inaccurate when referring to time.