To provide a data importance evaluating apparatus and method capable of evaluating the importance of each segment of video data or the like, producing abstracts and providing them to users.

An importance degree calculating section 14 of the data importance degree evaluating apparatus tentatively evaluates the importance of each segment of continuous data and gives the result to a abstract-generating section 16. The abstract-generating section 16 generates the abstract, on the basis of the tentative evaluation importance degree and provides this to the user 10. When the user 10 reproduces the segment on the basis of the digest, a reproduction instruction information receiving section 24 measures the reproduction time of the segment by the user 10 and calculates a ratio of the reproduction time to the time length of the segment. The importance degree calculating section 14 corrects the tentative evaluation importance degree, on the basis of the ratio of the reproduction time to reevaluate the degree of importance.