A vaguely defined academic discipline or job description relating to working with, and making sense of, data. Requires a combination of computer science/software engineering (to work with and handle data), statistics and math (to gain signals from data) and appropriate domain knowledge (to infer knowledge from the signals).
Compared and contrasted
to Data Engineering: Data engineering is a sub-field of data science and focused on working with data without the goal of domain-specific insights. This includes activities such as making the data available for further processing, correcting errors, adding value by combining data sets, archiving data and many more.
to Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence is a related discipline that also works with data, but aims to use data as the basis for automated decision processes by computers.