Hello. Welcome to this part on systems and software development we're going to start to look at some basic concepts for software and systems development that are data information and knowledge.
What is data?
data are facts that are unprocessed and unorganized, data can be anything we know like numerical data which are numbers in order to represent for example ages or quantities; we have alphabetic data which is just text to represent names or street names all kinds of text we can find and we have alphanumerical data which is a mixture of numbers and alphabetical data for an address for example which has a name of the street and the number forty in the address. Another data is for example images, photos and pictures that has been digitalized. Audio is also data which can be music or voice recording. We have videos and if we all have it together and we have multiple types of data then we call it multimedia. So this data is unprocessed and unorganized. If we get all these data and we process it, we get information.
How could we process it?
we can for example organize it, categorize it, classify it, sort it, filter it - to filter out certain data that we don't want to know of, we can contextualize it put into different contexts or make calculations on it for example if we have got lots of data on student's course we can for example puts it into the context of the nationality of the students and look at what are the scores of the students if we put it into the context of nationalities we can also contextualize it for example by sex female and male or we can contextualize it based on the background and studies that students have done and then we can process the information and we can process the data and get information. And we have this information we can make decisions based on this information. Because if we have information we can infer and draw conclusions we can understand what is going on we can understand different things within different contexts and we can make decisions and if we have sufficient information that enables us to make decisions then we have the knowledge so let's look at an example for example again with student's test scores student score is a piece of data and if we calculate the average score of the entire school for example then we have information we have information about the average score of all the students in an entire school and from this information we can infer conclusions and we can make decisions related to the study load, the learning materials and maybe even the quality of the teachers. Another example is a customer's invoice this is data it contains all kinds of data related to the customer so we can take this data and process it, so that we can for example have information on which items have been sold most what sizes of clothes or shoes have been sold most and we can take this information and infer conclusions and make decisions about planning and control of sales inventory or logistics. So we have seen that we have data which is raw and unprocessed facts which can be numbers, letters, text, images, videos, whatever from these data if we process it we filter, contextualize organize or sort or whatever we get information and if we have information and can use this information to infer conclusions we have the knowledge to make decisions. So, these are the basic concepts we are going to work on this module. In the next video we will talk about information systems.
Information System
What is an information system? An information system is actually a computerized system composed of people, hardware, software and procedures that work together to collect and store data and process it in such a way that we get information that we can use to take decisions and create knowledge. Data consists of collecting and storing it, organizing it, contextualizing it, sorting it, filtering it... this type of things to calculations everything in order to get information.
Different parts an information system is composed of. First we have hardware. Hardware in an information system is any physical component that can be touched or seen or basically any physical component of a computerized system that you can break, it includes, for example, the computer which has the central processing unit that processes and does all the calculations. It consists of a monitor that you can use to display the information that you have processed from the data, you have a keyboard that permits to input data into the system, a printer for example that allows you to print, a storage service that can store data like hard disks or flash drives, USB sticks and if you have communication devices like for example you can maybe connect your mobile or your tablet or the modems that are connected to the system. So this is all hardware, it's can break, you can touch it and you can see it.
The other component is data, obviously, because this is an information system and data is the foundation of all the information we can obtain. And its artifacts, the raw and the unprocessed facts that you use to get information. This data is normally stored in databases and that is just a way of storing data on a disk in the form that is readable by the machine.
The next component is the software. So software compared to hardware is something you cannot see you, cannot touch, and you cannot break it physically. So these are the computer programs. Computer programs are machine readable instructions, that give instructions to the circuitry of the hardware in order to indicate what you to do to process data and get useful information out of it. So as a small example, imagine that we have a web store where we sell products and we want to provide a discount to customers that by something above a hundred dollars. So we say ok we obtain the price of the product from the database then we take that price and we process it in such a way to find out whether it's more than a hundred dollars and if it is we give the client a discount. So this is at a very high level some type of software procedure that indicates to the computer what it is you do in order to process data and give us information.
The final component is people. People are always needed because if nobody's operating the system, the system is not really useful but these are not only the users, it's also other people that we need in order to operate systems. So for example people that administrate the computers, that install the software and do the updates. We also need people to maintain and the input the data, because if nobody maintains and inputs the data there's no data to process information from. And obviously also support the network of computer. If the computer breaks, it should be fixed. So this is a whole team of people that we need in order to make an information system work. And finally the last component of an information system are the procedures. The procedures actually describe how this hardware, this software, the databases and the data and the people should work together in order to process the information and produce the preferred output. So this is for example one of the procedure says that if we know that the price is above hundred dollars then the customer gets a discount. This is a very tiny example of a procedure that we can use and describes how we use the hardware, the software, the data and the people in order to obtain the information.
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