DEFINITION OF INFORMATION
Information has been defined severally by different scholars. It is view from diverse angles of its usage. The meaning and value of information is then user oriented i.e. the person who use it is the best person who can define what an information represents. Nonetheless, an attempt would be made to look at some definition of information.
Meadow and Yuan (1997) view information as “a message that changes the recipient’s knowledge base.” This implies that information adds significantly to the existing knowledge of the user. Buckland (1991) defines information as a process which occurs in the mind when a problem is united with data that can help solve it. Information is part of a process converting messages received into knowledge. Aiyepeku (1992) views information as something that reduces uncertainty in decision-making.
Budd (1992) defined information as “one of the building blocks in which data are ore (raw materials) followed by information which then leads to knowledge and this in turn gives rise to understanding which the leads to wisdom and consequently to decision-making.” From these definitions, it is clear that information is very important in Man’s activities, and without it, nothing or less may be achieved. Some of the essentials that information is attached to are: data, information, knowledge, wisdom, problem-solving, decision-making, e.t.c
INFORMATION SOURCING.
This is a process of searching for useful information from different sources. It must be well explained that information sources can be classified into two namely; formal and informal, internal and external. In some cases, sources of information could be from: Printed, Graphics, Oral, and Electronic sources. The system of searching through these sources by an information seeker, so as to retrieve the one that would help in decision making is called information sourcing.
Sourcing information products is a complex exercise involving many variables. In today's uncertain business climate, information budgets are sensitive to scrutiny and constantly under threat. In many cases, information professionals are faced with trying to get more value from suppliers with a flat or reduced budget or contending with a "now we have it, now we don't" scenario. What's more, there is a lot of rival content available from the Internet, making it more difficult to justify expenditure on pricey products.
As a category, information products pose a number of challenges to the information professional tasked with sourcing them. Information products constitute a complex category because they are difficult to compare on a feature-by-feature basis. Although there may be considerable overlap among the content offered and the products purchased, each one has certain unique features and a core group of users who consider these different products indispensable to their work. User needs can differ too, adding to the difficulty of comparing one product with another. In some segments of the market (real-time stock market data, for example) there is a virtual monopoly, which limits the relative power of the buyer. In the case of online news services, the tool itself, as well as the content, must be evaluated.
The practices of information sourcing maintain the following: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, extracting and verifying. All the just mentioned points are in stages which an information seeker would observe in the process of information sourcing.
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
This has been defined by numerous scholars in the field of information science. Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching relational databases and the World Wide Web.
An information retrieval process begins when a user enters a query
into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs, for example search strings in web search engines. In information retrieval a query does not uniquely identify a single object in the collection. Instead, several objects may match the query, perhaps with different degrees of relevancy
.
An object is an entity that is represented by information in a database.
User queries are matched against the database information. Depending on the applicationInformation retrieval applicationsAreas where information retrieval techniques are employed include :-General applications of information retrieval:* Digital libraries* Information filtering** Recommender systems* Media search...
The data objects may be, for example, text documents, images, audio, mind maps or videos. Often the documents themselves are not kept or stored directly in the IR system, but are instead represented in the system by document surrogates or metadata.
Most IR systems compute a numeric score on how well each objects in the database match the query, and rank the objects according to this value. The top ranking objects are then shown to the user. The process may then be iterated if the user wishes to refine the query. Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in the last years with the expansion of the Web (World Wide Web) and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices.
As a result, traditional IR textbooks have become quite out-of-date which has led to the introduction of new IR books recently. Nevertheless, we believe that there is still great need of a book that approaches the field in a rigorous and complete way from a computer-science perspective (in opposition to a user-centered perspective).
Mainly, information retrieval (IR) is the process of actual having and obtaining the needed information, after searching for such from available sources so as to use it for problem-solving. Information retrieval is equally important to an information seeker. This for the reason that, many times, the format in which an information is found, made it difficult to be retrieved. This means that, not all information sourced for may be retrieved and useful but un-retrieved information is useless to the user. Consequently, user’s ability to retrieve valuable information is of great concern.
ICT-BASED INFORMATION SOURCES
Information Communication and Technology (ICT) has brought a lot of development into the field of information. ICT came, and touché all aspect of information management which covers information life cycle. ICT-based information sources arrive in a wide diversity of forms and are accessed in diverse ways. To access the wide range of ICT-based sources of information, firstly, you need a computer with a telephone link, or access via your television or mobile telephone to the internet.
The range of ICT-based information sources includes; CD-ROM, teletex, viewdata, bulletin boards, online databases, intranets, the internet, CD-ROM encyclopedia, e.t.c.
THE ROLES OF ICT IN INFORMATION SOURCING
• It helps to understand the purpose of a range of ICT-based information sources.
• It aids the understanding of these different sources.
• ICT helps to decide what equipment and software you will need to access these different sources.
• It affords information seekers to be well exposed to much information, from which best is chosen.
• It helps information users to rightly judge different available sources, when compare and contrast.
• It (internet) is available all the time. It is ever ready.
• ICT made information seekers know that not all information is completely free.
• It helps to understand that information can be structural in different ways.
• It teaches confidentiality of information.
• It saves time.
THE ROLES OF ICT IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
• ICT allows more than one information seekers to retrieve the same information at the same.
• It helps to understand that some online databases are public and that some are private.
• It saves time and energy.
• It provides offline access to information, using flash drive, memory cards, and e.t.c.
• It provides large capacities of storage devices.
• It aids preservation of information for posterity.
• It helps accessibility of information at anytime or anywhere. Once it is downloaded from the internet, and is saved on the computer or other storage device.
REFERENCES
http://findarticles.com/articles
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu
