Wonderful, Leonard
I'm just back from Brussels working on the future of transport, with
about five hundred participants, and the search strings integrated
transport, walking and public transport, sustainable transport, and a
knew one, helping the market to co-operate have now entered the policy
agenda and the information management and knowledge sharing vocabularies
So we will watch the horses run, out of the gates
Try ec.europa.eu for starters
-----Original Message-----
From: ir represents the interests and activities of the BCS IRSG and
related groups. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leonard Will
Sent: 11 March 2009 15:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Search - the Science Making Tomorrow's World
>
>Search - the Science Making Tomorrow's World (Science Week Event!)
Date:
>Monday 9th March 2009
>Venue: London Offices, Southampton Street
>
>This is a joint Meeting with the Information Retrieval Specialist
Group.
>
>After five millennia, are traditional 'libraries' heading for the dusty
>storeroom as loose agglomerations of on-line knowledge are searched by
>increasingly sophisticated methods? As search takes on the editorial
role,
>will it come to be the author?
. . .
>We then start to look to the future, asking:
>
>Just how different might the world be when the Google generation are
>running it?
I attended this interesting meeting, but was rather disappointed with
the speakers' views of the future.
Is it really the case that simple Google-type searches are all we can
look forward to in the future? Is it really true that we cannot expect
users to use more advanced search techniques than putting a word or two
into a box and then being satisfied with the first few items retrieved?
If machines are to replace libraries as depositories of information,
might not the machines also replace the librarians as guides, advisors
and unobtrusive teachers in finding and selecting the most appropriate
information from these stores?
Will machines not in future be able to take the role of a librarian in
conducting a "reference interview", with questions and suggestions such
as:
* That's a very broad topic - do you want just general or
introductory works?
* We have the following more specific topics - would one of them be
more appropriate?
* This is a structured map of the subject field, which may help you
to refine your search by showing the relationship between concepts
and letting you choose the most appropriate ones.
* If you are interested in that, you might also be interested in
this.
* There is very little available on that specific topic, but you
might find some relevant material if you search for this more
general topic.
* This is a selection of resources that appear to match your request.
If you let me know which are of most interest, I'll try to find
more like them.
* Your query is for a combination of two or more topics. Can I help
you to formulate a query that will find them with the relationship
you need?
* That term is ambiguous. It could mean ... or ... . Which do you
want?
There seems to be a great neglect in the development of interactive user
interfaces of this kind. Is this not the sort of thing that the semantic
web is promising us? It will need some underlying understanding of the
relationships between subjects, either as a traditional classification
scheme or thesaurus or as some more complex from of ontology, whether it
is created intellectually by humans or mechanically by clever computers.
The terms "taxonomy" and "faceted classification" seem to occur with
increasing frequency in the literature (often, regrettably, with
imprecise meanings which lead to misunderstanding and confusion). Does
this not indicate that words alone are not proving sufficient and that
the traditional approach to "knowledge organisation" still has a big
role to play in the future of "search" in tomorrow's world?
Leonard Will
--
Willpower Information (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants Tel: +44 (0)20 8372 0092
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