Preface The inspiration for this endeavour came during the interaction of the contributors with field veterinarians as part of the Karnataka Veterinary Council (KVC) sponsored Continued Veterinary Education Programme on “Information Technology in Veterinary Practice” organized by the Department of Livestock Production & Management, Veterinary College, Bidar. It was realized that the Information Technology revolution tends to overawe most people. Many veterinarians believe that IT can hardly have any application in veterinary science, especially at the field level. Further, their lack of awareness regarding computers and the Internet hampers them from using these tools to their full potential. Though there are numerous books on Information Technology, hardly any of these have been written by a veterinarian, for a veterinarian, and about its applications in veterinary science! This book does not claim to cover all the technical aspects of the basics of computer science; it provides a general overview of these topics to make the reader aware of the fundamental concepts involved. Various applications of IT in animal health, veterinary education, livestock management and Internet resources are covered in greater detail. A glossary of commonly-used IT terms has also been included for easy reference. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Suresh S. Honnappagol, Hon’ble Vice-Chancellor, KVAFSU Bidar for writing the Foreword of this book. His vision and dynamic leadership have inspired us to take up this project. I am also grateful to Dr. Y. Hari Babu, Dean, Veterinary College, Bidar, for his encouragement, unstinted support and valuable contributions which made this work a reality. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Dr. S.M. Jayadevappa, President KVC and Dr. Shivakumar K.S., Registrar KVC for organizing the CVE Training Programme at Bidar. Sincere thanks are also due to Drs. Santosh Sarangamath, M.D. Suranagi and Shrikant Kulkarni, who have worked tirelessly as Co-Directors of the CVE training programme and contributed various chapters in this book. Thanks are also due to all the other contributors who have taken utmost care to ensure that recent and relevant information is presented in a simple, easy-to-understand manner. Special thanks are due to Dr. Prashant Waghmare for his support, and Dr. Vijay Kumar for his help in getting this book published. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and support provided by my parents, wife and children. Special thanks to my sister, Dr. Preeti, for her meticulous proof-reading. I am also grateful to the entire staff of New India Publishing Agency, New Delhi for their diligent and neat work.

VIVEK M. PATIL The term “information” has a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical interpretations. Generally speaking, the concept of information is associated with knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction. Technology, on the other hand, refers to the application of knowledge to the practical aims of human life, or to changing and manipulating the human environment. Technology includes the use of materials, tools, techniques and sources of power to make life easier or more pleasant and work more productive. Technology began to influence human endeavour as soon as people began using tools. Technology also started being used for managing information when the amount and variety of information grew to such vast proportions that the human brain could neither store nor process it efficiently. Definition The term Information Technology (IT) was coined by Jim Domsic of Michigan in November 1981. Domsic created the term to modernize the outdated phrase “data processing”. Information Technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate and/or disseminate information. Presumably, when speaking of Information Technology as a whole, it is noted that the use of computers and information are associated. “Information Technology” as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.” IT deals with the use of computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and securely retrieve information.

VIVEK M. PATIL & M.D. SURANAGI A computer is an electronic device that has the ability to store, retrieve, and process data, and can be programmed with instructions that it remembers. Simply put, it is a very obedient servant which does whatever task it is commanded to do, in the manner in which it is trained/ programmed to carry out that task. Some of the terms commonly referred to while using computers are: Hardware : The physical parts that make up a computer eg. input devices, the central processing unit (CPU), memory and output devices. Software : A set of instructions that tell the computer what to do and how to perform a particular task is called a program, software program, or software. eg. Microsoft Word document management software enables us to type out a letter. Peripherals : Hardware devices connected to a computer i.e. any part of the computer outside the CPU and working memory. eg. keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer, scanner, disk and tape drives, microphone, speakers, joystick, plotter, and camera. Input : Whatever is typed, submitted or entered into a computer system. eg. typing a list of names. Data : The symbols that represent facts, objects and ideas on a computer. eg. representation of a list of names in binary language. Processing : Manipulation of data by the CPU of the computer or a microprocessor. eg. sorting of the list of names in alphabetic order. Output : The result produced by a computer after manipulating data. eg. printing out the list of names in alphabetic order. Memory : An area of the computer that temporarily holds data waiting to be processed or stored. eg. random access memory (RAM) and read only memory (ROM)

M. D. SURANAGI Software is a tool that allows the hardware to process and manipulate data. It is essentially a list of commands; therefore it is not something you can touch. Software is stored in the different drives in a computer. Software, like data, can be stored and shared through disks. Unlike hardware, software is not permanent. It can be added, removed, and changed very easily. Individual software pieces are normally called programs. There are different types of programs. The three major categories of software are System software, Application software and Programming software. System software like device drivers and utilities enables the application software to interact with the computer hardware. Programming software like compilers, debuggers and interpreters provides tools to assist a programmer in writing computer programs. Application software is what most users commonly use to interact with their computers and carry out various daily tasks.

SANTOSH P. SARANGAMATH & VIVEK M. PATIL While System Software like device drivers and utilities enables the application software to interact with the computer hardware, Programming Software like compilers, debuggers and interpreters provides tools to assist a programmer in writing computer programs. However, most common users interact with their computers using Application Software, which enables them to carry out various daily tasks. Application Software Application software is programs that work with the operating system software to help the computer to do specific types of work. Applications are the pieces of software that perform tasks for the user besides helping the computer to operate (i.e. the task of system software). Applications range from games, calculators, and word processors (document creation programs). Application software can be easily divided by looking at exactly what function they serve. Listed below are some common types of software which one may encounter while using a computer. Application Software can be categorized into :

Evolution of the Internet The Internet, as we know it today had a very humble beginning. J C R Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology envisioned the Internet as far back as 1962 in a series of memos written by him that talked about social interactions that could be enabled through networking, a concept that he termed his “Galactic Network”. He joined DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in October 1962 and was its first research head. There, in collaboration with Lawrence G Roberts and other scientists in 1965, the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was conceived. With other developments, ARPANET was transformed into the Internet as we know it today. The technology involved in this was a very basic packet switching network that later moved to include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks. In packet switching mode, the hub router, which acts as the intermediary, decides the best path for sending or receiving data packets, unlike circuit switching mode (used in telephony) in which there is a dedicated path by which the data travels from the source to the destination. The future of networking was based on this skeleton. Further down the line, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was developed, which had the ability to address networks and machines further downstream. Other technologies like telnet, e-mail, internet telephony etc, were also developed subsequently. By 1990, the ARPANET was decommissioned and TCP/IP had displaced most other Wide Area Networking (WAN) protocols and was fast becoming the accepted protocol for internetworking. After a while, the World Wide Web (WWW) came into existence. A consortium called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was formed in 1992 and it had taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the web. Soon after this, commercialization of the internet started taking place. There was a marked increase in the number of communities across the internet. Bulletin Board Services and Usenet groups were now home to more computer users than ever before. With the advent of such information, corporations and businesses also started looking at the internet in terms of business viability. In 1994, Pizza Hut started offering pizza ordering on its Web page while First Virtual, the first ‘cyberbank’, launched its online presence. By this time, there were more than 38,64,000 hosts on the Internet. Since then, the Net has grown rapidly and the process continues to this day. Though the Internet hit India in the late 1980s, it was deemed fit only for researchers and scientists. Commercial internet access was first introduced by VSNL in August 1995. Today internet in India has ballooned and India has become a giant in the IT Enabled Services (ITES) field. With falling internet access costs and increasing users, India’s ranking in terms of internet users is rising fast. The Internet is growing at an amazing rate. The main reason for this is that the Internet has now become an accepted part of the mainstream urban life. It is used for almost everything imaginable, from recreation and entertainment to learning about rocket science. However, not everything about is good. There is an information overload and not all the data that is available is true and should not be accepted at face value. The internet is not limited to the PC anymore and has percolated down to various devices thanks to advancement in technologies like GPRS, EDGE, CDMA, WiFi etc. through which it can be accessed with a mobile device.

Livestock wealth is very precious for a developing country like India. In India, animal husbandry is no longer a subsidiary to agriculture or a backyard vocation. Animal husbandry has metamorphosed into an industry and the latest reports suggest that the contribution of animal husbandry sector to the GDP of the nation is substantially higher despite the meager input. Animal husbandry offers a better scope for marginal farmers whose income from agriculture is dwindling fast due to vagaries of monsoon, fragmentation of landholdings, pest problems, poor pricing etc. Though the growth of livestock industry is very promising, in order to make India a global leader in animal husbandry, it is imperative to integrate it with developments in other fields. The developments in Information Technology over the past few decades are tremendous and offer great potential in improving animal health through various measures like effective disease forecasting, rapid and accurate disease diagnosis, modern therapeutic measures etc. Veterinary Informatics is the discipline concerned with the application of information science, engineering, and computer technology to support veterinary health care. Veterinary informatics and the larger field of medical informatics is often called health care informatics or biomedical informatics and forms part of the wider domain of e-health. Applications of Information Technology in different aspects of animal health are discussed below.

A Hospital Management System not only provides an opportunity to the hospital to enhance their patient care but can also increase the profitability of the organization. These kinds of applications enable hospitals and doctors to serve their patients better. Computers are being extensively used for routine administrative purposes by health care professionals. In veterinary medicine, hospital management software is designed for all types of practices, ranging from small, single-vet ones to large ones with multiple locations and vets, and covers a wide range of hospital administration and management processes. It is an integrated end–to-end management system that provides relevant information across the hospital to support effective decision making for patient care, administration & critical financial accounting in a seamless flow. Specific areas of application include scheduling of appointments, registration of cases including client and patient data, case history and electronic medical records, health care reports, reminders, inventory controls, reports and accounting.

Telemedicine is a rapidly developing application of clinical medicine wherein medical information is transferred via telephone, the Internet or other networks for the purpose of consulting, and sometimes remote medical procedures or examinations. Telemedicine may be as simple as two health professionals discussing a case over the telephone, or as complex as using satellite technology and video-conferencing equipment to conduct a real-time consultation between medical specialists in two different countries. Telemedicine generally refers to the use of communications and information technologies for the delivery of clinical care. Care at a distance (also called in absentia care), is an old practice which was often conducted via post; there has been a long and successful history of in absentia health care, which, thanks to modern communication technology, has metamorphosed into what we now know as modern telemedicine. The terms e-health and tele-health are at times wrongly interchanged with telemedicine. Like the terms “medicine” and “health care”, telemedicine often refers only to the provision of clinical services while the term tele-health can refer to clinical and non-clinical services such as medical education, administration, and research. The term e-health is often, particularly in the UK and Europe, used as an umbrella term that includes tele-health, electronic medical records, and other components of health IT.

A nimal disease monitoring describes the ongoing efforts directed at assessing the health and disease status of a given population. The disease can be a specific infectious disease/diseases or health in general, whereas the monitoring activities are the routine recording, analyses and distribution of information related to the disease (or health). The term disease surveillance is used to describe a more active system and implies that some form of directed action will be taken if the data indicates a disease level above a certain threshold. In today’s click-and-access kind of world, Information Technology is finding applications in every field and animal disease monitoring & surveillance is no exception. The various technologies which are applied are Geographic Information Systems, Global Positioning System, database management, computer aided design (CAD), computer network technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), expert systems etc.

Starting from the middle of the 20th Century, information has become a commodity. Those best able to access information will be more successful than their peers in their future careers. Technological competence will be as important as medical competence to practice at the highest levels. Advances in computer technology have made access to veterinary and medical databases much simpler than in the past. It is quite likely that in the future, it will be a malpractice for practitioners not to access online information essential to the treatment of their patients. Wireless digital transfer of information will make access to necessary information independent of time and place. Veterinary medicine and educational delivery are becoming an increasingly international market. Those who are prepared to deliver material in this manner will have a competitive advantage. Use of digital technologies will allow veterinary colleges to share information, including class material, more efficiently. This will enable each college to market specific educational information for students at other veterinary colleges or continuing education modules to graduate veterinarians around the world. On-line certificate programmes in specific veterinary topics will be developed. Use of computer technologies can enrich the teaching environment. By digitizing library, classroom, and laboratory visual images, students can access these materials at any time or place, freeing them from library and classroom schedules. Medical colleges have found that students heavily use these image resources. Computer technologies provide both horizontal and vertical integration of the professional curriculum, allowing students to explore information to the depth at which they are comfortable, without regard to their “year of study” in a traditional “linear” curriculum. Allowing students to see future applications of current learning material provides additional incentive to master basic material. Computers are a tool, just like a textbook, notebook, or calculator.

Computers take on an increasingly important role in today’s world. In this regard, their utility as tools for imparting high quality professional knowledge to veterinarians is much needed. e-learning covers a wide set of applications and processes, including computer-based learning, web-based learning, virtual classrooms, and digital collaboration. The delivery of content could be via electronic media, including the internet, intranets, extranets, satellite broadcast, audio/video tape, TV and CD-ROM. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the form of on-line teaching, face-to face video-cases and video-performances has recently been applied in the veterinary profession all over the world. ‘m-learning’ is the new buzz word almost indicating learning “anywhere” using mobile phones and Bluetooth or WiFi technologies. However, in the veterinary profession, connectivity is an issue as high quality network service is lacking in most remote areas. Some other terms frequently interchanged with e-learning are online learning, online education, distance education, distance learning, technology-based training, web-based training and even computer-based training (generally thought of as learning from a CD-ROM). e-learning is a broad term used to describe learning done at a computer.

Dirying in India has traditionally been the preserve of landless agricultural labourers and small and marginal farmers, who have maintained very small herd sizes. However, of late, with increasing consumer awareness regarding milk quality, there has been a marked increase in the number of large, well-organized dairy farms which cater to predominantly urban markets. Terms like clean milk production, organic milk, microbial load of milk etc. are being used more frequently while referring to milk quality. Larger, intensive dairy farms not only profit from the economies of scale by way of optimum utilization of land, labour and resources, but also benefit from the fact that it is easier and cost-effective to implement more efficient technologies like machine milking, manufacture of by products, chilling, packaging, bulk transport etc. Further, most of these farms are able to realize a premium price for their products on account of high quality and brand identity, thus leading to greater profitability.

The Internet is a worldwide network of networks connecting millions of users, spread across continents, exchanging thousands of gigabytes of information, accessing numerous databases that cover everything from cooking to astronomy, all relatively inexpensively. The Internet offers virtually unlimited amounts of information related to animal medicine and provides all the tools to access it. ‘www’ is probably the most famous three letters of the last century, signifying a series of servers that are interconnected with each other through hypertext transfer protocol or ‘http’. A significant part of the credit for increasing the popularity of the Internet belongs to the World Wide Web. It is always better to use evaluated web resources as the quality of websites is a problem in cyberspace.

Introduction E lectronic-resources is an umbrella term which refers to provision of digital instruction courseware over the public Internet, private distance learning networks or in-house via an intranet. E-resources most often means an approach to facilitate and enhance access through the use of devices based on information and communications technologies (ICT) like personal computers, digital television, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) and mobile phones. The electronic resources might include notes, PowerPoint presentations, video clips or Internet sites. Online library resources aim at providing materials, information and services by different types of libraries to the end users. These libraries may be in different jurisdictions, but agree to serve one another on the same basis as each service to its own users through the use of ICT. With the rapid growth of information on veterinary science, there are frequent delays in providing service to the end users when traditional library systems are adopted. The cost of providing service is also rising, mainly because of manual methods and duplication of investments in library holdings. ICT enables the use of the Internet, email, discussion forums, and collaborative software to support students and veterinarians through the use of WANs (Wide Area Networks), and may also be considered where greater flexibility and just-in-time access is desired.

History of Social Networking Services The notion that individual computers linked electronically could form the basis of computer mediated social interaction and networking was suggested early on. There were many early efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication, including Usenet, ARPANET, LISTSERV, bulletin board services (BBS) etc. Early social networking websites included Classmates.com(1995), focusing on ties with former school mates, and SixDegrees.com(1997), focusing on indirect ties. User profiles could be created, messages sent to users held on a “friends list” and other members could be sought out who had similar interests to yours in their profiles. Whilst these features had existed in some form before SixDegrees.com came about, this would be the first time these functions were available in one package. Despite these new developments (that would later catch on and become immensely popular), the website simply wasn’t profitable and eventually shut down. It was even described by the website’s owner as “simply ahead of its time.” Two different models of social networking that came about in 1999 were trust-based, developed by Epinions.com, and friendship-based, such as those developed by Jonathan Bishop and used on some regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001. Innovations included not only showing who is “friends” with whom, but giving users more control over content and connectivity.

Computer Purchase With so many factors to consider, deciding which omputer to buy can be a real challenge. From components to software to accessories, new PCs offer a bewildering array of choices. Sifting through the large number of options can be a daunting task. Almost any PC on the market today can more than adequately handle such standard office chores as word processing and spreadsheets, as well as basic Internet functions like e-mail and general browsing. If you want to edit digital video or manage a large database, however, you may need more than the basics. The best way to pay only for what you need is to carefully consider what you want to do with your system now, and try to anticipate what might interest you next 2-3 years. Specific applications call for certain types of hardware, whether at home or in the office. When you’re ready to buy a computer, here are some recommendations for the average user’s basic requirements:

VIVEK M. PATIL Antivirus software : Programs specifically designed to detect and disable viruses and other harmful software that can invade the computer system and damage it. Applications/Application software : Programs designed to perform a specific function directly for the user or for another application program, using the services of the computer’s operating system and other supporting programs. eg. word processors, spreadsheet programs, database programs; image editing programs etc. Artificial Intelligence (AI) : The simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using the rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions), and self-correction. Aspect ratio : The ratio of the number of horizontal dots (pixels) to the number of vertical dots on the computer screen. Backup : A method of copying one of more files/folders from a hard drive on the computer to other external storage devices like a CD/DVD, external hard drive, flash drive etc. so as to have an additional copy of the data in case the original is damaged/lost. Bandwidth : In computer networks, bandwidth is often used as a synonym for data transfer rate - the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period (usually a second). This kind of bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps).

Index A Access 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 32, 33, 41, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 74, 89, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 108, 109, 112, 115, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 156, 164 Accessories 163, 166 Advantages 68, 102, 103, 111 Anti-spyware 43, 169 Anti-virus 42, 43, 55 Application software 3, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 54 Applications 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 23, 30, 31, 37, 38, 40, 51, 58, 60, 61, 67, 89, 96, 98, 101, 103, 104, 150, 153, 164 Artificial intelligence 3, 38, 63, 90 Asynchronous 84, 85, 87, 103, 103