IT- Info From Online Sources Flashcards
What does online mean in “obtaining information from online sources”?
Internet-based sources accessed primarily via the World Wide Web.
Examples of online sources. (Doesn’t have to be the ones in answer)
Magazines, newspapers, news such as BBC, CNN and AI Jazeera, journals, forums, blogs and social media sites.
Other terms for online sources are:
Electronics sources, web sources and internet sources.
Why does the quality of data and information available from online sources vary from one source to another.
Different authors will have differing motives for publishing the data and information. Also, each author may have taken a different level of care to ensure that the information being presented is accurate and unbiased.
What is one main way to judge the overall quality of information?
By reliability
What is reliability?
This is the degree or extent to which the content of the information can be depended on to be accurate.
Four characteristics of reliability:
Authenticity, Lack of bias, Currency, Relevance
What’s authenticity?
This means that the information is real or true.
What’s lack of bias?
This means that the information has been judged fairly and is not influenced by personal opinions.
What’s currency?
The information has the quality of belonging to the present time and is not out of date.
What’s relevance?
This means that he information is connected or appropriate to its use.
You should use only highly reliable information. In order to test the overall quality of the information, you will need to test the quality of each characteristic by conducting a ‘four-way test’. Describe the four parts of this test.
1 Is the same data or information available from multiple independent sources?
2 Is the information presented in an impartial(biased) manner?
3 Is the information up to date?
4 Is the information appropriate for the intended purpose?
What does it mean when data is collected on forms?
This means that dat is in a human-readable format.
What’s verification relating to entry of data?
This is a process during which data that has already been inputted or captured is checked to ensure that it matches the data on the sources document.
What does good verification if data do?
Good verification significantly reduces the number of typographical and transposition errors that occur during data entry.
What’s a typographical error?
This is a typing error that affects the text, such as missing or additional characters.
What’s a transposition error?
This is caused baby switching the position of two adjacent characters in a number or text string. E.g: typing $5,450 as $5,540 or spelling Guyana as Gyuana.
What’s validation?
This is a checking process in a program which is aimed at finding out if the data is genuine. Any data that is invalid is rejected by the validation process and must be corrected before data is accepted.
List some validation checks.
Range check, reasonableness check, data type check, consistency check, presence check, format check, length check.
What’s the main difference between validation and verification?
The main difference between verification and validation is that verification checks the data being input to the system while validation authenticates the data once it is in the system. Verification is carried out by humans; validation is carried out by the computer.
