first chapter in our course "Basic Components of ICT"

Basic Concept (1-14)

Welcome to the first chapter in our course "Basic Components of ICT".

Dear Student,
After studying chapter one you should be able to:
• Differentiate among Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom.
• Distinguish among Database, Table, Record and Data Elements.
• Extract tables keys of database.
• Define concepts related to database
• Define security aspects of information systems.
• Define terms related to Network based IT and Network Access.
• List applications of internet.
• Differentiate between computer architecture and computer organization.
• Define examples of system software.
• Define examples of application software.
• Classify peripherals of computer.
Define concepts related to system availability and contingency planning
Topic 1:
Welcome my dear student in the first topic in chapter one.
"Scope of information technology"
This topic deals with the basic concepts of Information Technology, and discusses the differences among Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom.

Let’s start by discussing some basics about IT.

First of all, we know that Information technology comprises mainly computer and communication technologies that cooperate to facilitate storing, processing, distributing, and accessing data or related information and knowledge in different domains.

We also know that by using computers, communication links, and network components, we can form computer communication networks.

So, it’s clear that using different computers (at more than one site) to store and organize data and information with the help of databases, helps us to get information networks.

As seen, Figure (1) shows a conceptual view of Information and Computer Communication Networks



- Examples of computers like: personal computers, laptops and servers.
- Examples of communication links like: telephone lines, optical fibers, satellite Links and wireless Links.
- Examples of network components like: routers and switches
Click any of these pictures to be enlarged.


What is the meaning of Data?

You should know that Data represent the basic facts about an establishment.

Data collection or capture is an essential activity,and data verification should be performed before inserting the data into the database.

When Data elements are grouped, they form a record, and the records are grouped in a table.

In fact, the database consists of a number of tables related to each other depending on the data model used.
Example:
In a student information system,
Data elements could be: Student number, Student name, Admission year, Specialization, etc.

• A data record in the table (student's personal information) could contain the data elements: Student number, Student name, Address, Phone number, Birth date, etc.

• Another table could be about student's marks and grades in a certain subject.
It could contain the data elements: Student number, Student name, Mark, Grade, etc.

• Note that the previous tables are related to each other through the student number.
Figure (2) shows a pictorial representation of 2 tables in the Student Information System.


Figure (3) summarizes the basic components of a database.

• Information
is processed data to satisfy the needs of users, management personnel, and data analysts.
• Note The database may contain a large amount of data, but this data is not used to extract any information. In this case, the establishment is said to be (Data Rich, Information Poor).
• Example:
Figure (4) illustrates how to extract information from the database of the Student Information system.

In the student information system, an administrator may want to know the relationship between the grades of two subjects for all students, so:
A query is submitted to the database, which finds the relevant tables and gives a temporary table -as an output- giving the required relationship.




Two more concepts will be briefly presented.
Knowledge:
When the amount of data collected is very large and is distributed over a number of databases, the term data warehouse is used to represent that situation. The process of extracting information or knowledge from this data warehouse is called data mining, or a more expressive term is knowledge Discovery in Databases. For the time being, knowledge could be considered as processed information to arrive at simple general formulas or rules.

Wisdom:
When there are many knowledge sources, it may be useful to integrate them in a higher level of knowledge, which is called wisdom knowledge or simply wisdom.

Sometimes the generic term information is used to indicate four concepts with the following priority:
1- Wisdom.
2- Knowledge.
3- Information.
4- Data.
Information Technology as a Study Domain

• Information Technology as a study domain emphasizes the needs of the different classes of users within organizational or societal context.

• The activities in this respect are related to: Selection, Configuration, Integration, and Management of Computer and Communication Technologies.
• To achieve the above goals, you have to:
 Grasp the technical concepts of current information technologies.
 Formulate the requirements of organizations and individuals.
 Integrate the IT-based solutions into the user environment.
 Create an effective project plan.
In addition to that you have to:
 Develop a reasonable level of critical thinking and problem solving skills.
 Recognize the need for lifelong learning.
The advances in computing and communication technologies necessitated the creation of such a study domain.
The main topics needed are:
 Networking Technologies including mobile and wireless networks.
 The web and its applications including the Semantic and Wisdom Web.
 Language engineering support for the web and the universal networking language.
 System integration, administration, and maintenance.
 Advanced computer architectures and network-based computing.
 Integrated information Systems and information security.
 Human-computer interaction.
 Graphics, multimedia, and virtual reality.

Now, dear student ,,,
It is the time to do some exercises.Please move to the next page.

Topic 5:
The Fifth Topic of chapter one.
"Computer Hardware and Software Considerations"

Welcome my student in topic five.
This topic deals with the architecture of computer, computer organization, system software as (operating systems, language compilers and interpreters, etc) and application software as (information systems, artificial intelligence applications … etc).
In an information system, computer hardware and its related software represent an important subsystem. The following aspects will be presented in this section:
First, Computer architecture and computer organization:
Basic concepts .Listing some computer types ranging from handheld to supercomputers. Also, mention of some types that make use of networks as well as some future computer models.
Second, System Software:
Operating systems. Language compilers and interpreters (translators for the different computer languages). Browser and server software. Database Management software .Computer Graphics, Multimedia, and virtual reality (VR) Software.
Third, Application Software:
Different application software ranging from specific information systems to Artificial Intelligence Applications.
About computer peripherals and human computer interaction, it will be treated in a separate section




Computer Architecture and Computer Organization

Computer Architecture: refers to those characteristics or attributes seen by a programmer or user. Examples of these characteristics include:
1. the instruction set (Add, Subtract, multiply etc),.
2. the number of bits used to represent various data types.
3. Input/output mechanism, and
4. methods of addressing the main computer memory.

Computer Organization refers to the operational units (such as the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) and Control Unit (CU) and their interconnections that realize the architectural specification .These include the
Control signals needed for executing arithmetic operations, the memory technology used , and how the computer is connected to the different peripherals like Printers, display units and so on.

As shown, the two figures show two views of a computer model.
The first one -as shown in Figure (20) - is a simplified computer model, which consists of "Storage Unit" and "Processing Unit".
The second one -Figure (21) - is a more detailed view of a computer, which consists of "Input/output Unit", "Arithmetic and Logic Unit" and "Main Memory". These components are related through System Interconnection.

Future developments:
A number of approaches are being developed now to computers and computation, some of them are:
First, Autonomic Computing is inspired by the human nervous system and aims at realizing computing systems and applications capable of managing themselves with minimum human intervention.
Second, Quantum Computing makes use of concepts based on quantum physics to design computers that can solve problems much more efficiently than current computers.
Third, BioComputers use biologically derived materials (e.g. DNA and Proteins) to perform computations. It makes use of Nano-biotechnology to build the chemical components necessary to build such computers.


When we talk about computer systems, there are many types that can be discussed such as:

• Personal computers having different sizes.
• Laptop computers.
• Handheld computers.
• Servers and workstations (Powerful computers used in special applications like engineering design).
• Server farms (a collection of servers interconnected through a network to handle a large number of requests or to give more reliable server architecture).
• Mainframe computers (large and powerful computers for some centralized applications).
• Supercomputers (needed for complex scientific computations), like (the Earth Simulator and the Blue Gene).

The first concept to discuss is “Network-Centered Computation”:
It is possible to use different types of networks ranging from Local Area Networks to the Internet to interconnect a number of computers together to form a more powerful computing platform. This approach comprises Cluster Computing and grid computing.
Grids are emerging as a global infrastructure for the next generation of scientific applications that integrate large scale, distributed, and heterogeneous computer resources.

The second concept to discuss is “Embedded Computers”:
Due to advances in electronic technology, it is now possible to integrate all the components of a computer on a chip (called System-on-a-chip (SOC)). This chip is then integrated or embedded in any device or system, and is usually not visible to the user.

System Software

Examples of system software:
There are so many examples of system software, but we will discuss the following four examples.

First, “Operating Systems”:
Such as different versions of Windows, and Linux open source.
Open source systems are publicly and freely available and it is possible to modify and distribute them.

Second, “Language Compilers and Interpreters”:
Compilers and interpreters can be looked upon as translators that transform a program written in a specific language to the machine language that computers can understand. There are many languages available such as Java, C, C++, etc.
With the advent of the web, there are also languages that help users to build web pages like HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language).

Examples of system software (continued):

Two more examples to discuss. They are:

Third, “Database Management Systems (DBMS)”:
The DBMS is a complex software system consisting of many components that deal with:
Implementing the catalog which contains the metadata (refer to figure (6)), software to process queries and programs, software to access stored data, concurrency control (supervising the execution of more than one transaction), backup and recovery, and security (refer to figure 12).
As an example, if the computer system fails in the middle of an updating transaction, the recovery subsystem makes sure that the database is restored to the original state before the execution of the transaction.

Fourth and finally, “System Support”:
This is an important class of software that provides programs for common tasks such as:
Checking the integrity of the disks by showing the amount of storage available and the existence of any damage, system performance monitors, and system security.





Application Software

There are many examples of application software that cover diversified domains such as:
1- University Information Systems.
2- Airline Reservation Systems.
3- Hospital Information Systems.
4- Data Mining and Visualization Systems.
5- Decision Support Systems (DSS).
6- Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
7- Graphics, Multimedia and virtual reality applications.
8- Artificial Intelligence Applications.

Let us now consider the last two applications in more detail.

Graphics , Multimedia, and Virtual Reality Applications:

Let’s talk first about Graphics. Software graphics together with some hardware support is having many important applications. It's becoming an essential component in design processes especially for engineering and architecture. This activity is usually called Computer – Aided Design (CAD).
In addition, animations could also be used in CAD applications.
We can use Software graphics in: computer art, entertainment, education and training, and visualization of large volumes of data.
After Graphics, we will talk about Multimedia Software.
Multimedia software supports the integration of text, graphics, sound, animation, and videos to give more impressive and useful presentations. In addition to that, it enables the creation of multimedia web pages using HTML.

Graphics , Multimedia, and Virtual Reality Applications (continued):

Now, let’s talk about Virtual Reality (VR):
Virtual Reality (VR) makes use of three-dimensional graphics to synthesize computer- generated real world scenes that are very close to reality. Extra equipment like the Head Mounted Display (HMD) supplies the user's eyes with a stereoscopic view of the computer-generated world.
Complex software can also create acoustic images that simulate the sounds within a Virtual Environment (VE). It's also possible to provide tactile (touch) and haptic (force) images. A device that is called a Data Glove could be used to allow a person to operate a computer subsystem that provides natural feelings via tactile simulation and force feedback.

About the applications of Virtual Reality, it may include: scientific visualization, sound simulation, weather simulation, and medical modeling. On the web standards for transmitting virtual reality, worlds have been developed using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language).




Artificial Intelligence Applications:
At first, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is concerned with studying thought processes in humans, and then tries to implement some aspects of these processes in computers and robots.
The applications of AI are: expert systems, language engineering, artificial neural networks, and intelligent robots.
In the following lines, we will discuss these four applications in detail. We will start with Expert Systems.

Expert Systems
Acquire knowledge from an expert to a computer, and then to the user. It comprises the following activities:
- Knowledge acquisition: the source of that knowledge is the expert or the relevant books.
- Knowledge representation: organizing the acquired knowledge and storing it in a knowledge base.
- Inferencing: based on the stored knowledge, a computer program makes inferences related to some situations (e.g. in a medical expert system, inferring a disease from some symptoms).
- Knowledge transfer: inferences are transformed to the user in the form of recommendations (e.g. suggesting the medications to treat the disease).

Artificial Intelligence Applications (continued):
The second application to discuss is Language Engineering.
Language Engineering uses computer-based techniques and software to deal with applications involving either written or spoken language. Therefore, it is closely linked to the field of linguistics.
Some language engineering applications include: speech understanding systems with applications to automated call centers, multilingual access to information on the web, machine translation Systems for written and spoken languages, and development of lexical databases like the WordNet which could be used as a networked dictionary and thesaurus.
The third application to discuss is Artificial Neural Networks.

Artificial Neural Networks:
Software programs that model the
human brain.
A neural network is composed of a large number of processors that operate in parallel and interconnected together to simulate neurons (brain cells). Neural networks are useful for pattern recognition applications.

Artificial Intelligence Applications (continued):
The fourth and last application of AI is “Intelligent Robots” .
Research in intelligent robots is advancing at a rapid rate. One of the projects concentrating on such activity is called RoboCup. It is an international robotics competition founded in 1993. Its aim is to develop autonomous robots playing football using different forms of robots including humanoid robots. The ultimate goal is to develop by the year 2050 a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team.
There is also a RoboCup Rescue competition which was triggered by the great earthquake which hit Kobe City in Japan in 1995 causing more than 6500 casualties. The aim of this research is to promote: Multi-agent team work coordination, physical robotic agents for search and rescue operations, and the required information infrastructure.
Another competition is called Virtual RoboCup which aims to develop real time 3-dimensional visualization of RoboCup simulations of football games.

Topic 6:
The Sixth Topic in chapter one.
"Computer peripherals and Human-Computer Interaction".
This topic illustrates components of computer system and its peripheral devices.

A computer system consists not only of the computer but also of other devices, called peripherals as was shown in the simplified diagram in figure (20).

Moreover, since the computer may be connected to other computers, communication lines are needed to achieve that objective.

There are many peripheral devices; some of them are listed in the following page.

Since humans are going to use computer systems, it is essential to study human- computer interaction (HCI). The following issues may be studied :

Effect of the computer environment on humans such as strain effects on the eye, shoulders, and hand. Also due to the importance of color in the different visual display devices, a very brief exposition about one color model and human color perception will be presented.

Peripheral Devices

There are many peripheral devices and the following is a list of some of them:
1. Keyboards and Mice.
2. Visual Display Units.
3. Printers and Scanners.
4. Removable Storage Devices.
5. Compact Disk (CD) drives and Digital Video Disk (DVD) drives.
6. Sound cards and equipment.
7. Video input and output cards.
8. Digital cameras.
9. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) units.
10. Structured Cabling Systems.

1- Keyboards and Mice:

The first peripheral device we will talk about is the Keyboard, which is a very important and essential one.
A Keyboard is a basic peripheral for inputting data to a computer. It consists of a number of keys some of them are numeric, others are alphabetic, and the rest have special symbols imprinted on them. Some keyboards are also bilingual (for example, they have both English (Latin) as well as Arabic characters, and these types of keyboards therefore are called A/L keyboards). A microprocessor built on the keyboard controls its operation and sends the code for the pressed key to the computer.

Mice also, are very important and essential for inputting data to a computer.
A mouse is one type of input devices called pointing devices (others are Joysticks used in games). A mouse could be moved by hand causing a corresponding movement on the screen. For a mechanical mouse, dragging it across a flat surface, a ball protruding from the underside of the mouse turns in the direction of movement. The position of the mouse is encoded and sent to the computer when a button is clicked.

The second one will be “Visual Display Units”:

Such devices are Outputting devices, for example, PC monitors. They Display Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) colors on the surface of a screen. Images on the screen consist of a large number of pixels (picture elements).A bitmap contains all the information in all pixels (location and color information). Computers can store and display bitmaps which can adapt themselves to size changes and the movement required by animation. Usually, a graphics adapter is the interface between the monitor and the computer.
The Types of monitors. There are three types of monitors:
- The first uses a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) with three colors.
- The second is a more compact display, largely used in laptop computers, and uses a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). This is thinner than a CRT display.
- The Third type is called Gas Plasma Display. It is also like thin LCD (less than 5 cm) so you can even hang it on the wall. It differs from the LCD in that it is brighter and can be seen from a wide angle.

3- Printers and Scanners

First, “Printers”. Printers are also output devices. A large number of them create a pattern of dots on paper. The smaller the dots, the more clear and attractive is the printout. Printers may be: Dot-matrix, ink-jet, laser, or color laser.

Different bitmap fonts may be used in case of text, but another method uses outline or vector fonts. In the latter case , a Page Description Language (PDL), such as Adobe Postscript or HP Printer Control Language (PCL) are used .PDL considers that everything is treated as a graphic and a series of commands are used to determine where each dot is placed on the page.

Second, “scanners”. Scanners are input devices to convert a drawing, text page, or photograph into a code that a graphics program can use to display the image on the screen or print it on a printer.

It can also use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert printed type into text that could be edited later on.

4- Removable Storage Devices:
There are many removable devices such as Floppy disk drives, Magnetic tape drives, CD drives, DVD drives, and Flash Memories.

Floppy Disks are portable and inexpensive but their capacity and speed are limited. Some Hard disk drives are also removable having a much higher capacity.

Optical storage devices such as CDs and DVDs store large amounts of data and will be briefly discussed in the next page.

Flash memories are nonvolatile storage devices and they represent a convenient means for storing information with capacities that can reach 4G bytes and more.
They are useful also in devices like Digital Cameras.

5- CDs and DVDs:

First, CD-ROM (Read Only Memory Drives):
CDs are small, interchangeable, Plastic- encased disks from which data is retrieved using a laser beam. The storage capacity of a CD is 650 Mbytes.
Second, DVD (Digital Video Disk):
Has a much higher capacity (can reach 8.5 G bytes or more) than a CD and may be used to store a whole movie.
Third, CD-R (CD-Recordable):
Drives can write data to a special type of compact disk.
It is Possible to add more data to what was written, but you cannot delete or change what is already stored.
Fourth, CD-RW (CD-Read Write):
Drives are rewritable versions that use also special read-write compact disks.
Fifth, DVD-RAM:
Drives are also rewritable versions of DVD.

6- Sound Cards and Equipment

Using sound equipment is very essential in our life. You can connect a microphone or an audio CD player to a computer using an input sound card. The sound card receives sound in continuous analog form and transforms it to digital form using an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) chip. Then, a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) compresses the digital data and sends it to be stored on the hard disk as a special file.

In addition to the microphone, acting as an input device, it is also possible to add output sound equipment, as loud speakers, to enhance the sound output from the computer. This is achieved through an output sound card that contains a Digital –to-Analog converter (DAC) chip.

6- Sound Cards and Equipment (continued)

Speech recognition is also possible using computers, although it is a difficult problem since speech differs from person to person. Therefore, the first step in speech recognition is to let the specific person dictate a specific text for about 10 to 60 minutes.

From this, the software forms a table of vocal references, which indicate the differences of the speaker’s pronunciation of phonemes from the standard reference.

Phonemes are the smallest sound units that combine into words. There are 48 phonemes in English and 34 in Arabic. After this phase, the speaker dictates the actual text to be transcribed (converted to written text) where the speech recognizer makes use of a natural language component to help resolve the many ambiguities that may occur.

7) Video Input and Output Cards:
Video input cards allow connecting a Television or sometimes a TV antenna to the computer and then to store the video in a file or watch some TV stations. It is also possible to use video output cards to record video files on a video recorder. Some of these cards come with a remote control device to select TV channels and perform other adjustments for the displayed channel.


Digital cameras:
In digital cameras, images can be focused on a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) which has an array of transistors that creates electric current proportional to the light intensity. These transistors make up the pixels of the image and generate an analog signal that is converted to digital form using an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). Then, a Digital Signal Processor compresses the image and sends it to the camera storage medium. Later, it is possible to use a Universal Serial Bus (USB) or SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) to store the image files on the computer hard disk.

9) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID):

The last peripheral device to talk about is RFID. RFID is a technology for automatic Identification of objects and people. The RFID device (usually called an RFID tag) is a small chip designed for wireless transmission. It is attached to an antenna in a small package that looks like an adhesive sticker. The RFID tag transmits data over the air in response to a signal coming from an RFID reader. The data collected by the RFID reader may consult a computer database to get more information about the object or person.

RFIDs are used today in many applications such as, cards used for building access and ignition keys for many automobiles. It is also possible for RFIDs to replace optical barcode readers offering several advantages over them.

10) Structured Cabling System:
Connecting the different computers of an Information Network together is becoming a very important task. Many studies indicated that the network is down due to inferior cabling system.
When planning a structured cabling system, it is important to have a standards-based method of installing an integrated data, voice, and video cabling system.

The structured cabling system represents less than 10% of the information system cost.
However, a poor cabling system can cause up to 80% of network downtime.

Figure (22) illustrates this.


Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Strain Effects on the Eye, Shoulders, and Hand:

Many computer peripheral equipment that are used by humans do not usually take into consideration the effect on the human sensing organs. For example, keyboards, mice, visual display units, and virtual reality equipment do not study the effect of using these peripherals and the strain they may cause on humans.
Some of these effects will be briefly presented.

Eye Strain:
This includes focusing problems, double vision, and headache.
Controlling the lighting, in the work environment often reduces eyestrain since glare, reflection, high ambient light and inadequately illuminated reading material may be responsible for it.



Strain Effects on the Eye, Shoulders, and Hand(continued):

Strain Effects on Shoulders and Hands:
Computer work involves actions of the shoulders, arms, wrists, and hands. Persons who use keyboard and mice for long hours of repetitive movements may suffer from Cumulative Trauma Disorders (CTD) of the shoulders, arms, wrists, and hands.

Repetitive key stroking results in tensing muscles and irritating the hand tendons which in their turn result in Carpal Tunnel syndrome (CTS).A network of tendons controlled by muscles in the forearm enables hands and fingers to move.

Nine Tendons along with blood vessels and the median nerve pass through the wrist in a narrow tunnel called the carpal tunnel. CTS occurs when the tendons become inflamed compressing the median nerve.

The Red Green Blue (RGB) Color Model:

The Tristimulus theory of vision states that our eyes perceive color through the stimulation of three visual pigments in the cones of the retina. These visual pigments have peak sensitivity at wavelengths of about 630 nanometer (red), 530 nanometer (green), and 450 nanometer (blue). By comparing intensities in a light source, we perceive the color of the light. This theory is the basis of the RGB color model.

This model could be represented with the unit cube defined on R, G, and B axes as shown in figure(23).The origin represents black, and the vertex (1,1,1) represents white. Vertices of the cube on the axes represent the primary colors, and the remaining vertices represent the complementary colors.



Summary:

• Information technology comprises mainly computer and communication technologies that cooperate to facilitate storing, processing, distributing, and accessing data or related information and knowledge in different domains.

• Using computers, communication links, and network components, we can form computer communication networks.

• Data represent the basic facts about an establishment. Data collection or capture is an essential activity, and data verification should be performed before inserting the data into the database.

• When Data elements are grouped, they form a record, and the records are grouped in a table.

• Database consists of a number of tables related to each other depending on the data model used

• Information is processed data to satisfy the needs of users, management personnel, and data analysts.

• Data warehouse: when the amount of data collected is very large and is distributed over a number of databases, the term data warehouse is used to represent that situation.

• The process of extracting information or knowledge from this data warehouse is called data mining, or a more expressive term is knowledge Discovery in Databases.

• Wisdom: when there are many knowledge sources, it may be useful to integrate them in a higher level of knowledge.

• Information technology as a study domain emphasizes the needs of the different classes of users within organizational or societal context.

• The activities in this respect are related to: Selection, Configuration, Integration, and Management of Computer and Communication Technologies.

• Information is becoming an important resource for many organizations. It could be in the form of basic data elements, processed data (information needed for the different management personnel to help them in decision- making), or knowledge extracted from huge amount of data by means of data mining techniques.

Try to solve the following activities by yourself in an external file (ex. word document) then discuss it with your classmates.
1. What are the two main steps for securing a transaction.
Indicate the system modules needed to achieve each step with the help of a block diagram.

2. Give the general architecture for an internet to interconnect the following systems:
 A general database on a general server that could be accessed by internal or external users.
 A special database and its server that is used only for a certain department and that is secured on the internal or the external levels.
Include a neat block diagram labeling the different entities!

Thank you very much about this great effort

شكرا على هذا الجهد الرائع

Thanks for your effort but where are the figures?!!

Thnx 4 ur effort.....

i well put the figures soon or i well send email for all with file attach for the chapter

لقد ارسلت للجميع ملف ورد بالمحتوي وفيه الصور بالتوفيق

Thank you very much

جزاكي الله خيراً يا شيرين ، بجد مجهود كبير ربنا يجعله في ميزان حسناتك إن شاء الله