Fundamentals of Computer Information Systems - Vocabulary | CIS 201, Study notes of Computer Science

Download Fundamentals of Computer Information Systems - Vocabulary | CIS 201 and more Study notes Computer Science in PDF only on Docsity! Fundamentals of Information Systems, Fifth Edition 3-1 Ch. 3 Key Terms  Attribute—a characteristic of an entity.  Business intelligence (BI)—the process of gathering enough of the right information in a timely manner and usable form and analyzing it to have a positive impact on business strategy, tactics, or operations.  Character—a basic building block of information, consisting of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numeric digits, or special symbols.  Competitive intelligence—one aspect of business intelligence limited to information about competitors and the ways that knowledge affects strategy, tactics, and operations.  Concurrency control—a method of dealing with a situation in which two or more people need to access the same record in a database at the same time.  Counterintelligence—the steps an organization takes to protect information sought by “hostile” intelligence gatherers.  Data administrator—a nontechnical position responsible for defining and implementing consistent principles for a variety of data issues.  Data definition language (DDL)—a collection of instructions and commands used to define and describe data and data relationships in a specific database.  Data dictionary—a detailed description of all data used in the database.  Data item—the specific value of an attribute.  Data manipulation language (DML)—the commands that are used to manipulate the data in a database.  Data mart—a subset of a data warehouse.  Data mining—an information-analysis tool that involves the automated discovery of patterns and relationships in a data warehouse or a data mart.  Data model—a diagram of entities and their relationships.  Data warehouse—a database that collects business information from many sources in the enterprise, covering all aspects of the company’s processes, products, and customers.  Database administrator (DBA)—a skilled IS professional who directs all activities related to an organization’s database.  Database approach to data management—an approach whereby a pool of related data is shared by multiple application programs.  Database management system (DBMS)—a group of programs that manipulate the database and provide an interface between the database and its users and other application programs.  Distributed database—a database in which the data can be spread across several smaller databases connected via telecommunications devices.  Domain—the allowable values for data attributes.  Enterprise data modeling—the data modeling done at the level of the entire enterprise.  Entity—a generalized class of people, places, or things for which data is collected, stored, and maintained.  Entity-relationship (ER) diagrams—the data models that use basic graphical symbols to show the organization of and relationships between data.  Field—typically a name, number, or combination of characters that describes an aspect of a business object or activity.  File—a collection of related records.  Hierarchy of data—bits, characters, fields, records, files, and databases.  Joining—the data manipulation that combines two or more tables.  Key—a field or set of fields in a record that is used to identify the record.  Linking—the data manipulation that relates or links two or more tables using common data attributes.  Object-oriented database—the database that stores both data and its processing instructions.