Free Open Source Online Databases






 * “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” (Samuel Johnson; British author and father of the English dictionary; 1709-1784.)


 * “The strongest memory is not as strong as the weakest ink.” (Confucius; Chinese thinker and social philosopher, whose teachings and philosophy have deeply influenced Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese thought and life; 551 BC-479 BC.)

Introduction
A database is a collection of information that is organized so that it can easily help to solve problems and accomplish tasks. A database may be as simple and short-lived as a handwritten shopping list, and as large as the Web. Yes, the World Wide Web is a database, and you certainly want all of your students to become facile in making effective use of this database.

This IAE-pedia document covers:

1. Background information.

2. Databases examples.

3. Helping students learn about databases.

Think of a database as a table used both to store data and to retrieve information. For example, consider the "old fashioned" hard copy telephone book. For a large city, it might contain hundreds of thousands of names in alphabetical order, along with address and phone number for each name. Typically such a database is used to find the address and phone number of a particular person or business.

However, it can also be used to find the name of a person or a business with a particular phone number. Think about that task. If you had to do it by hand, you would have to start at the beginning and look at all the phone numbers, one at a time. A computer can be programmed to do such a task. But, a computer can also sort a database. That is, a computer can be used to create a second database ordered by phone number. Then finding a particular phone number is no more difficult than finding a particular name.

A dictionary is a frequently used database. If you know the alphabet and how to spell a particular word, you can quickly find the word in the dictionary—provided the word is in the dictionary. But, suppose you don't quite know how to spell the word. You can see that it takes both education and practice to learn to make effective use of a dictionary.


 * This is an "aside" for those of you who like word puzzles. When a person says that a word is not in a particular dictionary, the person usually means that the word is not one of the words in the alphabetical list of all the words that are defined in the dictionary. Do you suppose that a dictionary might use a word that is not in the alphabetical word list of all dictionary words as part of the definition of a word that is in the alphabetical word list?


 * Imagine the task of reading every word in a dictionary to learn if a particular word is actually used somewhere in the dictionary. But, in essence, that is the way a search engine such as Google searches the documents it contains. Google contains an alphabetized list of every word in the entire collection of documents that it stores. One way to think about this is to consider the number of words in a particular language such as English. The English language contains more than a million different words. My 8/7/2016 Google search of the word can produced over 11 trillion results!


 * While you are puzzling out how a search engine actually is able to find documents that you might be looking for, also think about how many of these one million English words we want students in an English-speaking country to learn how to define and spell. Clearly there is more to learning to read and write in English than just rote memory!

Your Brain Contains a Database
Now think of your brain as a database, a storage device that contains a database of your accumulated knowledge and skills. You are learning new things all the time, and you also are forgetting things all the time. The quote from Confucius given at the beginning of this document shows that we humans had insights into this memory problem thousands of years ago.

The development of reading and writing provided a very powerful aid to human brains. Reading and writing allow us to create databases that can readily be duplicated and preserved over a number of years. Reading and writing can be thought of as human-developed "mind tools" to aid the "oral tradition" that had served humans for tens of thousands of years. Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or verses. In this way, it is possible for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system, or in parallel to a writing system.

Since the development of reading and writing a little over 5,000 years ago, people have found it quite useful to have formal schools. The goal is to provide all children with a good opportunity to learn to read and write.

Now we have computers, the Internet and Web, and many computerized tools. Each of these technological developments has an effect on what we could/should be teaching students in school. Moreover, the capabilities of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) continue to improve. This means our educational systems are faced by a moving target!

Databases and Schooling Curriculum Content
The quotation from Samuel Johnson at the beginning of this IAE-pedia document helps to define a fundamental question in education. What information do we want students be able to access mentally, and what information do we want students to be able to access by other means?

This raises other questions. Here are two issues that are particularly important to education:

Validity. What is the validity (accuracy) of one's memory and of information one retrieves from other sources? See Moursund and Sylwester's free book, Validity and Credibility of Information. We want students to recognize the fallibility of their own brains and the inaccuracies that may exist in the information that we have available as we work to solve problems and accomplish tasks.

Totality of Accumulated, Accessible Information. The total accumulated knowledge of humanity can be thought of as a database, one that is growing very rapidly. Quoting from a 2013 article about Buckminster Fuller and the Knowledge Doubling Curve:


 * Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.

To what extent and in which curriculum areas are students learning to deal with these important issues? And, again, what information should students be required to memorize and what can they "know" by knowing how to search for and locate the needed information––and then to evaluate the validity/accuracy of the information they locate?

Background Information on Databases
Nowadays, the term database typically makes a person think about computers and large amounts of information being stored in and processed by computers. Click here for an overview of the general field of computer databases.

However, as long as we have had reading and writing, people have collected information and organized it in a manner useful in helping to solve problems and accomplish tasks. For example, data collected from a census is a database. Tax records are a database. Dictionaries and encyclopedias are databases.

You are currently reading a document stored in the IAE-pedia, a database consisting of a collection of documents. Moreover, the IAE-pedia is stored in (on) the Web (World Wide Web), and the Web is a database.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has greatly changed the overall discipline of the collection, storage, analysis, and use of data. Indeed, think about the definition of a computer. A computer is a machine for the input, storage, processing, and output of information. It is clear that databases and computers are inherently closely connected.

An important part of the history of electronic digital computers goes back to the U.S. censuses of 1880 and 1890. Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * The 1880 census had taken seven years to process, and by the time the results were available, they were clearly obsolete. Due to rapid growth of the U.S. population from 1880 to 1890, primarily because of immigration, it was estimated that the 1890 census would take approximately 13 years to complete — an immense logistical problem. Since the U.S. Constitution mandates a census every ten years to apportion representatives and direct taxes between the states, a faster method was necessary.

Herman Hollerith developed the idea of punching holes representing the data into thin cardboard cards and using an electromechanical machine to process such cards. This made it possible to process the 1890 census data in two years.

Below is a quote and a picture from an IBM history website:


 * Herman Hollerith’s first tabulating machines opened the world’s eyes to the very idea of data processing. Along the way, the machines also laid the foundation for IBM.



Perhaps you are interested in listening to some lectures that provide an introduction to databases. If so, one good source are the 2013 Database Lessons #1 to #8 by Dr. Daniel Snoper.

In this series of videos, Soper gives introductory lectures on topics that include the reasons for using a database, the components of a database system, the elements of a database, the purpose of database management systems (DBMS), and the functions of a database application.

Some Examples of Databases
From time to time I find myself interested in finding answers to questions such as the current population of the U.S. and the world, and how fast they are growing. A static database does not provide good answers to such questions, since the populations are changing minute by minute.

A more informative information source is the U.S. and World Population Clock. Click here to go to the site. The screen shot given below contains the U.S. Census Bureau's estimates for a particular second on July 31, 2016.



This database illustrates the very important idea that we need information that is both accurate and current. Before computers began to become available in our schools, students gained much of the information they were learning from textbooks. The typical school district purchased new textbooks on a six- or seven-year cycle. So, just before an updated textbook became available, the information that students were reading might have been seven or eight years out of date.

When my children began to attend school, my wife and I purchased a set of Encyclopædia Britannica. I remember that this cost several hundred dollars, and I built a bookcase just to house the set. I also remember that yearly updates were available for purchase.

Currently, the English version of the Wikipedia contains about 60 times as many words as the next largest encyclopedia, the Encyclopædia Britannica. And, the Wikipedia is available free online.

Here is one more important piece of this story. The economy of scale in printing hard copies of a book typically means that additions, updates, and corrections are made only once a year or even less often. When the material is available on the Web, such changes are being made a number of times a day. However, this creates an interesting problem. Suppose I read an article from the Wikipedia, and a friend of mine reads this Wikipedia entry a week later. The entry may well have changed during that week!

Here is the quotation from Samuel Johnson given at the beginning of this document:


 * “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” (Samuel Johnson; British author and father of the English dictionary; 1709-1784.)

To me, Samuel Johnson's statement means that school should help you, a student, to:


 * 1) Develop a level of expertise in one or more areas that will help you to begin your first occupation or career.
 * 2) Learn to learn and to make effective use of the accumulated knowledge, skills, and experience of others. For example, learn to recognize and pose problems and questions that are meaningful to yourself and/or others, and to draw upon the accumulated knowledge of the human race to help solve these problems and answer these questions.
 * 3) Develop habits of mind that will serve you well in the changing world that you will face during your lifetime.

This set of ideas suggests to me that teachers in all subject areas and at all grade levels (preK to post-doctorate) should help their students learn to access and effectively use information resources appropriate to each student's cognitive maturity and education level.

This reminds me of a story about my own education. As an undergraduate majoring in mathematics, I never made use of a book, magazine, or journal stored in the Math Library. The content I studied was governed by the course textbooks and the "oral tradition" of how math was taught in those days. Indeed, there was always the issue at the end of the year as to whether to keep my copy of the textbook or to sell it back to the bookstore.

Area-specific Databases
Much of the following information comes from the Wikipedia: Size Comparisons. Here are some examples of large, discipline-specific databases.


 * Astronomy. The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects searchable online.


 * Biology. The World Resources Institute claims that approximately 1.4 million species have been named, out of an unknown number of total species. A 2011 study says there are 8,700,000 species (6,500,000 land species, 2,200,000 marine species). Click here for the homepage of the World Resources Institute.


 * Chemistry. As of June, 2014, over 81 million CAS registry numbers have been allocated for chemical compounds. The Beilstein database claims entries on "8 million organic and 1.4 million inorganic and organometallic compounds". The Merck Index Subscription Edition has over 10,000 monographs on chemical compounds.


 * Film and television. As of June 10, 2016, The Internet Movie Database has records on 3,793,472 titles and 7,266,040 names.


 * Genetics. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man has over 23,000 entries, each describing a known gene, as of July 23, 2015.


 * Geography. As of March, 2004, the USGS Geographic Names Information System claims to have almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features within the United States.


 * Internet. As of August, 2011, Internet Archive claims to have indexed over 150 billion pages, +548,000 moving images, +82,000 concerts, +948,000 recordings and +2,945,000 texts. On 7/31/2016 the eBooks and Texts indicates:


 * The Internet Archive and Open Library offers over 10,000,000 fully accessible books and texts. There is also a collection of 300,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed or downloaded by the print-disabled.


 * Libraries. The U.S. Library of Congress claims that it holds approximately 155 million items, 12 million of which are electronically searchable. Copac is a searchable electronic catalogue of over 35 million books held in libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland (includes all electronic records from the British Library)


 * Music. The FreeDB database holds information for nearly 2 million compact discs. Many of the CDs are duplicates, however, so the number of unique CDs is unclear. As of January, 2015, the Jamendo project contained 460,000 tracks.


 * OpenLibrary. OpenLibrary is a free, digital lending library with millions of eBooks that can be read in a browser or downloaded for reading offline. Originally developed to support the Print Disabled community, OpenLibrary now contains over 250,000 public domain and contemporary eBooks. Get a free OpenLibrary card and borrow an eBook today!

Helping Students Learn About Databases
Many teachers want their students to learn how to create and use databases. This might best be done in an environment in which students create databases to help solve problems and accomplish tasks that are of particular interest to them. A challenge to teachers is to locate examples that students will find inherently interesting. The next four subsections contain examples that may interest quite a few students.

Word Processors
You know that a word processor is a widely used and quite useful piece of computer software. Of course, long before we had computers and typewriters, students learned to be their own "by hand" word processors. What does a computer add to the process of writing?

Suppose, for example, your students know how to write well enough to make a written list on paper, and a similar list on a word processor. This might be a list of names and contact information for a set of friends. It might be a list of music and performers. It might be a list of places visited. With a computer copy of a list, a student can explore arranging the list in alphabetical order, or in numerical order as appropriate. The student can add to the list, delete from the list, make copies of the list to share with friends, and so forth. Through this exercise, a student can gain insight into the value of having a computerized list versus the value of having a hard copy list.

The dictionary in a word processor is a very useful database. It makes it possible for the system to automatically check the spelling of each word that is entered into a document as it is being written. And it can be used to quickly check the definition of any word in the document.


 * As an "aside," I read many books on my tablet computer. When I come to a word that I don't know, I merely touch the word on the screen. My tablet computer produces a dictionary definition for me as well as a link to Web information about the word. I find that useful and fun.

The spell checker in a word processor can be improved by adding a provision to "make guesses" about the possible spelling of a word that it does not find in the dictionary. The writer is informed that a word in the document is not in the dictionary and is provided with a short list of words that the writer might have intended to write.

Moreover, a good spell checker contains provisions for the writer to personalize the system. For example, a user can add words to the dictionary. In addition, a modern spell checker includes a feature that allows the user to specify misspelled words along with their correct spelling, and tell the word processor to automatically correct such misspellings. (Personally, I find that quite useful. My fingers make certain misspelling over and over again.)

When writing with a word processor, it is relatively easy to insert pictures, graphs, and charts copied from various Web sources. It is easy to scan in such material from a source that is not on a computer or other electronic device. It is also possible to create one's own graphic images, either on a computer or "by hand," and include them in one's written document. Such graphics add a new dimension to writing.

A modern word processor, all by itself, raises a number of questions about the design and implementation of school curriculum. For example, do we still want to teach cursive handwriting? Instead we might use some of the time spent developing a "good hand" (neat penmanship) to instead teach fast keyboarding. Students can learn to keyboard faster than they can hand write, and the results for many students are more legible.

Do we want students to learn to write in an environment in which they can easily include graphic images? Do we want students to learn some of the skills of a graphic artist, such as the design of a written document that contains graphics so that it effectively communicates with readers?

The examples and questions given above illustrate learning about databases and some of their uses by comparing "by hand" ways of solving certain kinds of problems and accomplishing certain types of tasks, versus using computerized aids to do the same thing.

Spreadsheets
A spreadsheet can be thought of as a two-dimensional table of data––a particular type of database. Spreadsheet software makes it easy to do calculations on such a table of data. That is one reason why spreadsheets are so useful in keeping a budget. The table can be used to record income from various sources and to record different categories of expenses. The spreadsheet software can be used to automatically calculate sums of rows or columns, to readily insert new sources of income and expenses, and so on.

Spreadsheets are routinely used in business, but they are also useful in the sciences and in many other disciplines of study. Because spreadsheets are such a powerful and broadly used tool, it seems desirable that as students study various subject areas they should learn about their usefulness (or, the lack there of) in the subject areas.

Concordances
A concordance is an alphabetical index of all the words in a text or corpus of texts, showing every contextual occurrence of the word. Scholars who concentrate their studies on a particular book or set of books find it to be quite useful to have access to a concordance of these books.

Imagine how much work would be involved in the "by hand" development of a concordance of all of Shakespeare's writings. Once these documents are stored in a computer, it is a relatively simple and rapid task to produce a concordance.

There are a number of free software programs that can be used to create a concordance. Click here for an example from Download Now. Quoting from the website:


 * This program lets you create word lists and search natural language text files for words, phrases, and patterns. [Simple Concordance Program] (SCP) is a concordance and word listing program that is able to read texts written in many languages. There are built-in alphabets for English, French, German, Greek. Russian, etc.

With a concordance program, one can "feed in" a document such as a paper a student has just written. The computer can be used to determine the frequency of use of the different words in a document and the number of different words the document contains. This can be a fun activity for students.

Portfolios
A portfolio is an example of a database created to save and display a student's work. This may be in hard copy form, electronic form, or a combination of the two. A 7/31/2016 Google search of the expression student portfolios produced about 25 million results. Thus, a teacher can find lots of help in this area.

The idea of student portfolios is not new. Quoting from Student Portfolios: Classroom Uses, a 1993 U.S. Government publication:


 * Portfolios are collections of student work representing a selection of performance. Portfolios in classrooms today are derived from the visual and performing arts tradition in which they serve to showcase artists' accomplishments and personally favored works. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision.


 * More teachers have recently begun using portfolios in all curricular areas. Portfolios are useful as a support to the new instructional approaches that emphasize the student's role in constructing understanding and the teacher's role in promoting understanding. For example, in writing instruction, portfolios can function to illustrate the range of assignments, goals, and audiences for which a student produced written material. In addition, portfolios can be a record of the activities undertaken over time in the development of written products. They can also be used to support cooperative teaming by offering an opportunity for students to share and comment on each other's work. For example, a videotape of students speaking French in the classroom can be used to evoke a critical evaluation of each other's conversational skills at various points during the school year.

Helen Barrett has long been a leader in the area of student-developed electronic portfolios. Her website provides access to a large number of articles on this topic.

Dave Guymon's 5/20/2014 Edutopia article discusses Four Web Tools for Student Portfolios. Quoting from his article:


 * Kidblog is unique among the web tools featured here because it is built by teachers for teachers. Their website explains that their mission is "to empower teachers to embrace the benefits of the coming digital revolution in education."


 * If your school is fueled by Google Apps for Education, then using Google Sites to create student portfolios, or "Googlios," makes perfect sense.


 * For classrooms with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) or 1:1 initiatives in place, Evernote can serve as a viable option for creating student portfolios.


 * A mobile app with a desktop version, Three Ring is worthy of consideration as well.

Final Remarks
This IAE-pedia document just touches the surface of databases as aids to representing and solving problems. My recommendation is that a good, modern education includes students learning to create their own databases and developing skill in using databases created by others.

Today's children are growing up in a world that differs greatly from the world of several decades ago. They routinely make use of huge and still growing databases that did not exist when their parents were children.

Here is one final example to ponder. I have a Smartphone, and it contains GPS (Global Positioning System) capabilities. When I get into my car to travel to a particular location, I can key my destination address into my Smartphone. The GPS then gives me very detailed directions for driving to that location. In essence, it is accessing a database that contains street and highway maps of the country. The GPS system keeps track of the location of my Smartphone relative to my destination. A computer system uses that information in coordination with the map database to provide me with detailed driving directions. I find this truly amazing, but children just take this for granted!

Think about other problems that computers can now easily solve, and the educational implications of these steadily growing capabilities of ICT.

Lists of Free Online Resources 
Moursund, D. (2016). Fair use. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 7/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Fair_Use.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free educational videos. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Educational_Videos.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free IAE math education materials. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_IAE_Math_Education_Materials.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free math education videos. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 7/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Math_Education_Videos.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free math software. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Math_Software.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open content libraries. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 6/27/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Content_Libraries.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open source and open content educational materials. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Source_and_Open_Content_Educational_Materials.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open source online databases. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Source_Online_Databases.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open source software packages. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Source_Software_Packages.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free science education software. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Science_Education_Software.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free science education videos. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Science_Education_Videos.

Popular Free Online IAE Books 

 * Moursund, D. (February, 2016). Math Methods for Preservice Teachers. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/283-math-methods-for-preservice-elementary-teacher-1/file.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/282-math-methods-for-preservice-elementary-teacher/file.html. HTML file: http://iae-pedia.org/Math_Methods_for_Preservice_Elementary_Teachers.


 * Moursund, D. (August, 2015). Brain Science for Educators and Parents. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/271-brain-science-for-educators-and-parents-1/file.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/270-brain-science-for-educators-and-parents/file.html. HTML file: http://iae-pedia.org/Brain_Science.


 * Moursund, D. (2/28/2015). Technology and Problem Solving in PreK-12 Education for Adult Life, Careers, and Further Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/267-technology-and-problem-solving-in-prek-12-education-1.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/266-technology-and-problem-solving-in-prek-12-education.html. HTML file: http://iae-pedia.org/Technology_and_Problem_Solving.


 * Sylwester, R., and Moursund, D., eds. (2012). Creating an Appropriate 21st Century Education. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/243-creating-an-appropriate-21st-century-education.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/242-creating-an-appropriate-21st-century-education.html.


 * Moursund, D., and Albrecht, R. (2011). Using Math Games and Word Problems to Increase Math Maturity. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/211-using-math-games-and-word-problems-to-increase-the-math-maturity-of-k-8-students.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/210-using-math-games-and-word-problems-to-increase-the-math-maturity-of-k-8-students.html.

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Author
The original version of this page was created by David Moursund and edited by Ann Lathrop.