An information system mainly includes four elements: personnel, machine, network and database.
The database is the source of information. The carrier of information in various forms, can be books and periodicals paper, can also be film, tape, disk, CD, screen and so on. Therefore, databases as information sources can be digital libraries, archives, museums, or machine-readable text files, electronic systems, etc. They feed the information superhighway, the Internet.
Network mainly refers to the information network system composed of various information systems and the necessary network standards, communication protocols, operating procedures and transmission codes, etc. Network plays the role of information transmission channel. Information superhighway is a kind of large information transmission channel. At present, there are already a large number of English data running on the information superhighway, and the flow of Chinese data should be gradually increased in the future.
The machine in the information system is an information facility, which mainly includes various physical equipment used to obtain, transmit, process and use information, such as electronic computer terminals, fax machines, scanners, printers and so on.
The personnel in the information system is the information subject, which should include the developers, providers, managers and users of various information resources. People (members), machines (machines), networks (networks), data (libraries) constitute an organic whole, by the information production department to develop information products, establish various types of databases, information highways, Internet and databases are linked together, information users through the computer terminal query information.