Information Technology

Information technologies (IT) is an umbrella term used to describe some technical advances that deal with data storage, transmission, and manipulation on computer devices. They are used to store data in different formats or extensions, access it on demand, share through networks and manipulate data in one way or another.
Data is stored as a sequence of zeroes and ones that instruct the computer how to process it. For example, images are 3-dimensional arrays of integers that describe pictures by the color of each dot: images are 2-dimensional on their own, but each color is a unique set of 3 RGB colors. Audio materials are represented as a long sequence of numbers denoting loudness and voice pitch. Finally, video is a complex arrangement of synchronized frames and audio constantly progressing. Raw text files are stored as a sequence of characters where each character corresponds to a single integer according to an encoding, usually UTF-8 [1, 2-8].
In order to access and store data efficiently, databases where developed. They store large quantity of data in a number of ways, from specialised .db files to JavaScript Object Notations (JSONs). Databases employ one or more database paradigms (key-value pairs, wide columns, document-oriented, relational, graph-based, search or multiparadigm) that allow software to read, write, delete and create the appropriate entries. Other optional and paradigm-specific abilities include search by keyword (search databases), join tables (relational).

One of the greatest achievement of informational technologies was invention and implementation of search engines. They are low-latency server-side applications that serve users from their search page and accept a query often formulated as a string of characters. Since search engines index the entire Internet, they can filter its database for the given keywords and rank them by a number of criteria (relevance, outlinks, presence of spam, etc.) and generate the response that is sent to the end-user. This became possible due to running crawlers, special bots that view all webpages one page has, counting its links and saving keywords starting from the list of initial pages.

Sources:

K. S. Proctor. (2011). Optimizing and Assessing Information Technology: Improving Business Project Execution. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

R. Kakasoltani, E. Deiri. (2016). Role of Information Technology to Choose Optimized Strategies in Management. Communications on Applied Electronics, 4(5), 54-56.