Information and Communication Technologies

Servers

Information technology (IT) or information and communication technology (ICT) is a field that deals with information systems, telecommunication and computers. This includes developing and managing systems, networks, databases and websites. This also includes maintaining computers and software and writing administrative software. This often takes place in a business context.

Definition of IT and ICT

Information technology means hardware, software products and services. Communication technology includes communication equipment and services.

The distinction between IT and ICT has blurred over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s, the computer and its software were classified as IT. The ICT included modems, networks and data communication protocols and thus an essential part of the telephony of that time.

Due to the growth of the available bandwidth for the Internet protocol, the distinction between different data streams has become smaller: telephony is no longer only via telephone cables, cable television is not only transmitted via television cables and radio is not exclusively transmitted via the air. All these channels are now also used for digital data streams. The computer as a stand-alone device, on the other hand, has lost significance and thus the distinction between IT and ICT.

Disciplines

 Human technology
 Computer science
 Information Science
 Information services and management
 Information engineering
 Knowledge technology
 Artificial intelligence
 Technical informatics (previously computer engineering or technical computer science)
 Telecommunications

Professions

 IT person (or IT person)
 Computer scientist
 Software developer
 Network administrator
 Private digital researcher
 Engineer
Data servers

Open Data

Open data is a term used to describe freely available information. The conditions under which this information is available are described in licenses and terms of use. With open data, the aim is to keep the restrictions in reuse to a minimum.

This article describes open data specifically in relation to the government. The government uses the following definition for open data:

Complete: all public data and information
Primary: source data, not aggregated
Timely: as soon as possible, to keep now
Accessible: for everyone, for any legal use, without (fin.) Barriers
Machine-readable: for automated processing
Non-discriminatory: without giving a reason, without registration
Open standards: so that the format is not a barrier
Open license: no restriction based on copyright law, database law, or confidentiality

Several governments have already started a register with references to open data.

Linked Open Data: five star model

To encourage parties that publish open data to make their data available in a format that is as reusable as possible, Tim Berners-Lee has proposed a five-star model. The following stars are awarded:

* The information is available on the internet in any format (e.g. PDF).
** The information is available online in a structured format, which is suitable for automated reuse (such as Excel instead of a picture of a table).
*** The information is available online in an open file format (such as CSV instead of Excel).
**** All of the above, plus it uses the open standards Resource Description Framework (RDF) and SPARQL, so others can easily refer to the data objects.
***** All of the above, plus other people's data is referenced for more context of the data (metadata).

Linked Open Data (LOD) is also a community project supervised by the W3C organization. Linked Open Data (five stars) is the essential part of the semantic web. Nowadays people often also speak of linked data when it comes to freely available information on the internet.

Licenses

In order to be usable, linked data must be made available under the public domain license. Another way to publish content is Creative Commons.