Information can come from almost anywhere - media, blogs, personal experiences, books, magazines and newspaper articles, expert opinions, encyclopedias, and even entertainment sites. Each of these sources can be defined as an information resource.
What is information? This is the information that we are trying to obtain as an answer to our questions. The source of the answer will vary depending on what question we asked. The use of information resources today is more and more transferred to the Internet, which is quite natural. What sources of information are used most often?
Journal
The magazine is a collection of articles and images on various popular topics, as well as displays of current events. As a rule, these articles are written by journalists or scientists and are aimed at the average adult. What can magazines be used for?
- to find information or opinions about a popular culture;
- To find the latest relevant information on current events;
- Read general articles for people who are not necessarily experts on the topic.
Magazines can cover very serious material and have a narrow specialization. Despite the fact that access to an information resource of this type is open to everyone, often they are of interest only to a particular group of people. Such a journal is a collection of articles written, as a rule, by scientists in the academic or professional field. The editorial staff reviews the articles to decide if they should be accepted. Magazine articles can cover very specific topics or narrow areas of research. Such an information resource (what is a narrow field of activity, does not need an explanation) can be used:
- when doing research;
- to find out what has been studied on a particular topic;
- to find sources that point to other relevant studies on the topic.
Database
The database contains citations from articles in magazines and newspapers. They may also contain links to podcasts, blogs, videos, and other types of media. Some databases contain abstracts or brief summaries of articles, while others contain full texts. Currently, they look like electronic information resources and can be used to search for both general and highly specialized information.
Newspapers
The newspaper is a collection of articles about current events, usually published daily. Since they are issued at least one in each city, this is an excellent local information resource. What is a newspaper as a source of information? So she helps:
- Find up-to-date information on international, national and local events;
- Find editorials, comments, expert or popular opinions.
Catalogs
Directories are organized information systems and resources in which each element has a name and can be found by an ordered list of names. The directory will indicate the location of a specific source or group of sources for your topic. They can help:
- find out what sources the library or website owns on your topic (today electronic libraries prevail, therefore, directories these days are information resources of the Internet);
- Find where a particular item is in the library.
Books
Books cover almost any topic and can be both scientific and artistic. For research purposes, you will probably need books that synthesize all the information on one topic (to support a particular argument or dissertation). In addition, books are the most common educational information resources both online and offline. They are necessary:
- when searching for a large amount of information on one topic;
- to compare a specific topic in context with other important issues;
- search for historical information;
- search for various resumes and research results.
Encyclopedia
Encyclopedias are collections of short factual entries, often written by different participants, who are well versed in a particular topic.
There are two types of encyclopedias: general and thematic. General guides provide brief overviews on a wide range of topics. Subject encyclopedias contain in-depth elements of focusing on one area of research. They are used:
- when searching for background information on a topic;
- when trying to find key ideas, important dates, or concepts.
Web sites
The system allows you to access most types of information on the Internet through a browser. One of the main features of the network is the ability to quickly contact another source of relevant information. The web system contains information in other formats than regular text, including in the form of sounds, images and videos. Thus, sites, as Internet information resources, can have a variety of forms and are needed to:
- find relevant information;
- Get information about a specific object;
- to study expert and popular opinions on various topics;
- pursue hobbies and find personal interests.
So, you can see that information and information resources are most often used today on the Internet. The reason for this is the development of the World Wide Web, but was this the case before?
The history of the development of Internet resources
The concept of an online information resource has evolved over the history of web searches, starting with the early concept of static addressable documents or files. Currently, this concept covers a specific source that can be identified with a name and address on the Internet or in any network system.
Information resource - what did such a concept mean at the beginning of the development of the Network?
At the beginning of the development of site specifications (1990-1994), such a definition did not yet exist. Sites were uploaded to the Web in the form of more or less static addressable objects, mainly in the form of files and documents associated with the use of common location tools (URLs). A web resource is implicitly defined as something that can be identified. Identification was carried out in two ways: by assigning names and addresses, the latter being dependent only on the protocol. At that time, the appearance of an object in a URI, URL and URN was not yet perceived as an information resource in its modern form.
With the development of Internet technologies, by the end of the 1990s, everything that has identity was called an information resource on the network. This concept included an electronic document, image, service (for example, an online weather forecast), as well as a system of other sources. Thus, the resource can remain constant, even if its content changes over time, provided that the conceptual mapping does not change in the process.
RDF format
First released in 1999, RDF was designed to describe resources, in other words, a tool that combines resource metadata in a standard way. The description of an RDF resource is a set of triples (subject, predicate, object), where the subject represents the resource that must be described, that is, the predicate is the type of property related to this resource, and the object is a data group or resource subject .
The predicate itself is considered as a resource and is identified by a URI. Therefore, properties such as “title” and “author” are presented in RDF as resources that can be used in a recursive manner (as a subject of other triples). Based on this principle, RDF dictionaries such as RDFS, OWL, and SKOS will accumulate definitions of abstract resources — their classes, properties, concepts, etc., that have been defined in the URI.
RDF also points to the definition of anonymous resources or empty nodes that are not mappable in the URI.
Using HTTP URI
URLs, in particular HTTP URIs, are often used to identify abstract information resources. Since such URIs are associated with the HTTP protocol, the question arose of what kind of identification should be obtained for such resources through this protocol using a web browser and can the syntax of the URI itself help differentiate between "abstract" and "information" resources? The URI specifications do not provide any answer to this question. It has been suggested that the HTTP URI is responsible for identifying a resource in the original sense - for example, a file, document, or any kind of so-called information resource should have a keyword in its name.
How is information generated for sources?
Educational information resources (and many others too) operate on the information of external or internal.
External information is data that was obtained outside the boundaries of an object and is general, global in nature. Such information can often be incomplete and contradictory. As an example, we can give information about the state of the market, about competition in various business fields, about various sales techniques, and so on.
External information can be obtained from sources such as:
- Mass media - magazines on a certain subject, websites, newspapers and the like.
- Specialized information on a specific topic - for example, economic information on exchange rates and the state of the foreign exchange market on the website of the Central Bank.
- Specific information - today, Internet search engines or various directories are used to obtain it.
- Information from government agencies - legislation and the like.
Internal information is data generated within any organization or object. This may include, for example, information about the availability of funds and resources in any organization. Another example of such data can be various kinds of internal statistics and estimates.