Jan/100
Information Sources
Information Sources are categorized into 3 levels:
1. Primary sources
Primary sources are raw data without interpretation that represents an official opinion. Examples of primary sources are memos, letters, interviews, laws, regulations, census, etc.
2. Secondary sources
Secondary sources are interpretations of primary data. Examples of secondary data are encyclopedias, textbooks, handbooks, magazine articles, newspaper articles, etc.
3. Tertiary sources
Tertiary sources may be interpretations of a secondary source, but generally represented by indexes, bibliographies, and other finding tools such as Internet search engines.
Jan/100
Data Mining
Data mining is the process of discovering knowledge from databases that are being stored in data marts or data warehouses. The purpose is to identify valid, novel, useful, and understandable patterns in data. Data mining searches large databases for essential information for managing an organization.
Data mining involves five step processes:
- Deciding between census and sample data
- Identifying relationship within the data.
- Modifying or transforming data.
- Developing a model that explains the data relationship.
- Testing the model’s accuracy.
Jan/100
Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is an electronic storage for databases that organizes large volumes of data into categories to support retrieval, interpretation, and sorting by end users. It provides an accessible archive to support dynamic organizational intelligence applications.
Data in a data warehouse must be continually updated to ensure that decision makers have access to the appropriate data for real-time decisions.
The more accessible the databases in the data warehouse, the more likely a researcher will use them to reveal patterns.