Information can come from almost anywhere - media, blogs, personal experience, 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 we are trying to get as an answer to our questions. The source of the answer will differ depending on which question we asked. The use of information resources today is increasingly transferred to the Internet, which is quite natural. What sources of information are used most often?
Magazine
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 popular culture;
- to find the latestup-to-date information on current events;
- read general articles for people who are not necessarily experts on the topic.
Magazines can cover very serious material and be highly specialized. Despite the fact that access to this type of information resource is open to everyone, they are often of interest only to a certain group of people. Such a journal is a collection of articles written, as a rule, by scientists in the academic or professional field. The editors review articles to decide if they should be accepted. Journal articles may cover very specific topics or narrow areas of research. Such an information resource (what a narrow field of activity is, does not need to be explained) can be used:
- when doing scientific research;
- to find out what has been learned on a particular topic;
- to find sources that point to other relevant research on the topic.
Database
The database contains quotations 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 short 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 currentevents, usually published daily. Since they are produced at least one in every city, this is a great 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
Catalogs are organized information systems and resources in which each item has a name and can be found by an ordered list of names. The directory will point to the location of a particular source or group of sources on your topic. They can help:
- find out what sources a library or site owns on your topic (today electronic libraries predominate, therefore, catalogs 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 needed:
- when searching for a large amount of information on one topic;
- to compare a specific topic in context withother important matters;
- search for historical information;
- search for various summaries and research results.
Encyclopedia
Encyclopedias are collections of short, factual entries, often written by different contributors who are well versed in the subject.
There are two types of encyclopedias: general and thematic. General reference books provide brief overviews on a wide range of topics. Subject encyclopedias contain in-depth elements focusing on one area of study. They are used:
- when searching for background information on a topic;
- when trying to find key ideas, important dates or concepts.
Websites
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 formats other than plain text, including sounds, images, and videos. Thus, sites, as Internet information resources, can have a variety of forms and are needed to:
- find up-to-date information;
- get information about a specific object;
- study expert and popular opinions on various topics;
- take up hobbies and find personal interests.
So, you can see that information and information resources todaymost commonly used on the Internet. The reason for this is the development of the World Wide Web, but was it so before?
The history of the development of Internet resources
The concept of a web content resource has evolved over the course of web search history, starting with the early concept of static, addressable documents or files. Currently, this concept covers a specific source that can be identified, having a name and address on the Internet or in some network system.
Information resource - what did such a concept mean at the beginning of the development of the Web?
At the beginning of the development of the site specification (1990-1994), such a definition did not yet exist. Sites were loaded onto the Web as more or less static addressable objects, mostly in the form of files and documents linked using uniform location tools (URLs). A web resource is implicitly defined as something that can be identified. In this case, identification was carried out in two ways: by assigning names and addresses, the latter depending 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 an identity began to be called an information resource on the network. This concept included an electronic document, an image, a 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, as long as the conceptual display does not change in the process.
RDF Format
When first released in 1999, RDF was intended to describe resources, in other words, a means of aggregating resource metadata in a standard way. An RDF resource description is a set of triples (subject, predicate, object) where the subject represents the resource to be described, i.e. the predicate is the type of property related to that resource, and the object is the data group or subject of the resource.
The predicate itself is treated as a resource and identified by a URI. Therefore, properties such as " title" and "author" are represented in RDF as resources that can be used recursively (as the subject of other triplets). Based on this principle, RDF dictionaries such as RDFS, OWL, and SKOS will accumulate abstract resource definitions - their classes, properties, concepts, etc. - that have been defined in a URI.
RDF also refers to the definition of anonymous resources or empty nodes that are not URI-maptable.
Using an HTTP URI
URLs, specifically HTTP URIs, are often used to identify abstract information resources. Since such URIs are associated with the HTTP protocol, the question arose as to 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 to differentiate between "abstract" and "informational" resources?The URI specifications do not provide any answer to this question. It has been suggested that an 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 the keyword in its name.
How is information generated for sources?
Educational information resources (and many others too) operate on external or internal information.
External information is data that was obtained outside of any object and is of a general, global 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 different areas of business, about various sales techniques, and so on.
External information can be obtained from sources such as:
- Mass media - magazines on certain topics, websites, newspapers and the like.
- Specialized information on a specific topic - for example, economic information about 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 an organization or entity. This may include, for example, information about the availability of funds and resources in someor organizations. Another example of such data can be various internal statistics and calculations.
