Nevertheless, the term "bits of information" or simply "bits" is more often heard, even in the fields of information and communication theory, rather than "shannons"; just saying "bits" can therefore be ambiguous. Using the term shannons, rather, is an explicit reference to the information capacity of a channel or storage system (or the expected information content of a source of messages, the so-called Shannon entropy), and is not restricted to binary data,[1] whereas "bits" can as well refer to the number of binary symbols involved, as is the term used in fields such as data processing.