Social and ethical issues
The widespread use of information technology has raised a number of ethical issues for people. The following are some of the issues that relate specifically to
organising data.
organising data.
- Current trends in organising data include the increasing use of the Internet and hypermedia. The Internet is growing at a very fast rate and has become an everyday tool for many people. Data is organised and stored using Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML). In addition to the growth of the Internet, software applications are providing better ways of accessing different types of data. For example, in early versions of word processing programs it was impossible to import an image into a document. Today this process is simple.
- Poorly organised data results in irrelevant information. If a database is poorly defined, it will contain additional data that is not necessary to solve the problem. It is important that data types be clearly defined for the information to be relevant and accurate.
- Data must be appropriate and complete. This issue was raised by the threat of the ‘millennium bug’ or ‘Y2K’ problem in the late 1990s. Not considering the end of the millennium, programmers used a two-digit field instead of a four-digit field to record the year. They used two digits to minimise computer memory and processing. With the change from 1999 to 2000, computer programs would be in danger of malfunctioning because they would identify ‘00’ as being 99 years before ‘99’ instead of one year after. It has cost billions of dollars to fix the incompleteness of this data.