IPT Task1-Databases 28/4/17

IPT Task 1, Part B

By #####

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Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Collecting 3
Organizing 5
Analyzing 6
Storing & Retrieving 7
Processing 7
Transmitting & Receiving 8
Nature of Data & Information 8

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Introduction
Information processes are the process present in an information system that helps it function and
complete a desired task, however not all the seven processes are required for an information system
to function. These seven information processes are collecting, organising, storing and retrieving,
analysing, transmitting and receiving, processing and displaying. All seven of these information
processes will be discussed in this document with regard to the information system that I have
created which is data base.

Collecting

Collecting is the information process where the data for the database is collected, which can be done
by many different means such as a survey or interviews etc. In the collection of the data for my
database, a survey was used. This survey gathers critical information that relates to students
performance in school and their Internet usage. The survey uses all appropriate data types and
includes a variety of questions that gather data not only
on students performance and internet usage, but also
the affects of internet usage and the amount of time
the student spends doing school work. However there
are some issues that may arise from collecting data
using a survey, these include Bias of Information,
accuracy of information, privacy/confidentiality and
copyright.

 Bias

In this survey there were mainly 2 types of bias present

which are gender and age bias.

Gender bias in this survey is present due to the fact that

in the amount of people surveyed only 3 out of 20 were
girls whereas the rest were boys. This may skew the
data towards the opinions and answers of the boys
which may be different than girls. Therefore the
information acquired is mainly only for boys.

As stated above, age bias is also present in the

information. This is due to the fact that most of the students surveyed are 16 year of age with only a
few exceptions. This survey being based on internet usage and students performance in school will
gather different results if handed out to a variety of age groups. This is because some age groups
may have the freedom to use the internet a lot more than others; an example of such circumstances
would be comparing a student that is 13 years of age to someone who is 17, it may be the case that
the student who is 17 has a lot more work and pressure from school thus having to spend less time
on the internet would be an option for him/her which can influence the information gathered.

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 Accuracy

Accuracy is a way of indentifying how correct a piece

of data/information is. How accurate the
information is depends on a variety of factors, all
which are related to the student who fills out the
survey. The accuracy of the information gathered
through the survey depends on how accurate the
information is that the student give, which depends
on how serious he/she is while filling out the survey.
Being a survey for teenagers there is no doubt going
to be some people who will put down wrong
answers on purpose or others who just want to
“goof” around. As a result of this, all the surveys
were checked in order to make sure that the
answers make sense. Therefore the accuracy of the
information gathered is quite high but there still
may be some room for error regarding information and therefore false trends may be created when
analysing the survey’s results or making reports.

 Privacy/Confidentiality

Privacy/Confidentiality deals with the

matter of keeping a person’s
information locked from the public
unless you have their consent not to.
There are laws which keep privacy in
check and a breach of these can have
serious consequences such as going to
jail. In my information system which is
a database, a person cannot be
uniquely identified through his or her
information. This is because when the
information is gathered through the
use of a survey, the student who
completes the survey does not need to
write down their name or any other information that uniquely identifies them. Another way that
privacy is kept in check is through the idea that one student’s survey will never be distributed or
shown to any other student and therefore protecting a student’s privacy. This could impact the type
of questions that are present on my survey, making it so that questions that are too personal cannot
be asked.

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 Copyright

Copyright is the issue that deals with plagiarism of

information for one’s personal gain. Copyright can
be breached through many different ways, most of
which are ‘copying and pasting’ information. As a
way to get around plagiarism there are laws that
protects a person’s information so that no one else
can copy it and strict penalties such as jail for
those who do. Copyright has NOT influenced my
survey to much extent except that I would need to
be careful when designing my survey. As the topic
of my survey has been used many times before, I
would have to make sure that the questions in my survey are not copies of questions asked before
and that my surveys design is original. The images in my survey may also present some copyright
issues as they have been ‘copied’ from the internet and not made by myself. To get around this,
recognition must be given to the places where I got my images from through the use of a
bibliography.

Organising

Organising is the process of arranging, representing or formatting data for the use of other
information systems. There are many ways of organising information; however the one used by me
is called a database. Through the database the results were displayed using graphs and reports but
the data needed to be organised further more to be used to display the results.

 How the information was organised

First of all the information

collected from the survey was
organised into a database
table with a unique number
which identified it. Each
column of the table hosted a
different question and a data
type was used for each
question from the survey to
make the organisation of that
result easier, for example,
integers would use the data type of “number”. However the results could not be displayed this way
as it is too complicate for the average person to interpret, so parts of this table where then
organised into queries which are really easy to interpret and display. A query is organised data that
can be used to display results and interpret trends. These organised queries were then imported into
Excel, organised into another table and made into a graph. The information was also organised by
alphabetical order in each column to make the information easier to understand.

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Analysing

Analysing is the process of inspecting, transforming and modelling data with the goal discovering
useful information and suggesting conclusions/displaying results. The raw data was gathered
through a survey and with 20 surveys it was difficult to interpret the data and find any results that
were meaningful. So it had to be analysed.

 How the data was analysed & transformed

into meaningful results

There were a few stages to the data analysis which

included data requirements, data processing and data
cleaning.

Data requirements was the stage at which I had to

figure out what type of data I wanted for my
information system, this could include numerical, text
type etc. I would have to make sure that the data was
in the correct format and that the data types are what
is needed.

Data processing was the stage at which the data

needed to be processed; this stage is similar to the “Organising” stage mentioned earlier where the
data must be put into a table in a format and made into structured data from which you can identify
trends and other important points.

Data cleaning was the stage at which I had to check if the data was complete, didn’t contain errors,
duplicates etc. This is unlike accuracy as accuracy deals with how close to the truth the information
is. The Data Cleaning Phase is similar to the “Collecting” phase where accuracy had to be checked;
however in the data cleaning phase validity also had to be checked.

After the Data Cleaning was finished, the data was ready to be transformed into meaningful results
through the use of a report and graph. These two elements displayed crucial results such as the
relationship between “Internet time and Average Task Percentage”

An Example of a Graph

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Storing & Retrieving

The Storing and Retrieving is an information process deals with the concept that data will always
need to be stored if it has to be retrieved and used later. The data should be stored in a way that it
can accommodate for a temporary halt in the system, backup and recovery and the transfer of data.

 How it was Stored & Retrieved

The data was stored in many different forms so that the

probability of losing the data was kept to the minimum. The
data was first stored on a Table in Ms Access which allowed
for easy access. After that the data was stored in a form also in
Ms Access, which makes the probability losing data even less.
Therefore if something happens to the table, the form can be
used instead and vice versa. As a final mean of Storing, the
data was stored on a USB just in case all the data was deleted
off Ms Access. This is how the data was stored throughout the assignment. The data was always
retrieved from the table, form and Survey but never from the USB due to there being no need. The
information was retrieved when there was a need to create the query, report and Charts, with each
stage having to retrieve different data. For the query the data was retrieved from the table and for
the report and chart it was retrieved from the query.

Processing

Processing is the only information process that changes the existing data, unlike organising where
the format of the data was changed and analysing where the validity and other factors were
checked. There can be many reasons as to why the data would need to be edited such as a wrong
answer on a question in the survey.

 How I Processed the Data

There were many steps to the processing of the data that I

collected from the survey, accuracy of the data was checked
in the collecting phase and the validity was checked in the
analysing phase, and therefore in this phase I was ready to
go and change the data a bit just in case of false or incorrect answers. A few answers were changed
in the database table depending on how inaccurate the results were, however the answers were not
changed on the survey itself, to maintain an original copy of the answers just in case it turned out
that the results on the survey were correct. Also due to there being too many fields in my report, to
create a chart I calculated averages of certain data such as a student’s average percentage in School
Tasks. Again, this phase is similar to others such as analysing however the major difference is data is
changed here. The information from the data was calculated through three separate graphs that
identified specific trends.

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Transmitting and Receiving

Transmitting and Receiving is an information process that allows for the transfer of data between
information systems. This information process allows communication between different devices and
for this to be successful; it also has to be received. In this section it will be discussed how data can be
transmitted and received to another schools IPT class.

 How it will be transmitted and received

There are a few ways that the data could be transmitted to another schools IPT class such as by
email as an Ms Access attachment, stored onto an iCloud where the IPT class has access to. The best
option would be the one which is most efficient, and according to research an iCloud would be the
best option. An iCloud is also more reliable than email as everyone can get access to it whereas for
an email, the data would have to be sent to everyone. Fax can also be used to send the data to
another IPT class; this is because fax directly sends the data to a printer in the other class. Issues
with these methods would be that data would be immediately lost on iCloud is the server crashes for
that organisation, for an email the issue could be that the email can easily be deleted and lost of the
email server crashes. Issues with fax would be that not many schools would have fax due to new and
emerging technologies that are more efficient than Fax. Another method of transmission would be
walking to that school and giving each and every person the information; however this would be
inefficient and take too much time.

Therefore out of all these methods, the best would be iCloud or email as they are the most secure,
fast and easy to transmit and use.

Nature of Data and Information

Image

An example of an image used was a graph which was used to display particular data that explored
particular trends

Text

Text was widely used to display results such as a query, report etc. Text refers to anything that
displays data in a text format.

Numbers

Numerical data was used to display results such as averages as they are a form of numerical data.
These numbers were used to create charts which are classified as images.