User:KYPark/007

A DIRECT APPROACH TO INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Table of Contents

   WHAT
   WHY
   HOW
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE LINE OF ATTACK
3. SYSTEMS VS. USERS
   3.1 Discrimination
   3.2 Prediction
4. DOCUMENTS VS. SURROGATES
5. THE THEORY OF INTERPRETATION
   5.1 Denotation and Connotation
   5.2 The Theory of Ogden and Richards
   5.3 Implications for Information Retrieval
6. PROPOSAL FOR FILE ORGANIZATION
   6.1 Incentives
   6.2 Extracts as Indexing Sources
   6.3 Extracts as Review Sources
7. CONCLUSION
8. REFERENCES

Contents

7. CONCLUSION

I think, as many others may do, that in his World Encyclopedia, H. G. Wells proposed in effect an ideal of file organization for information retrieval. Refer again to the prefatory statement made by him. The crucial point here is to select and collate carefully, and to present critically. So far this study has attempted to move toward his ideal. ^[1] ^[2]

Say, "World Encyclopedia." This somewhat tricky wording seems to bear some misunderstanding. Clearly, it is to put away miscellany and synthesize the essence only rather than to bring all together. In general, words being freed from its proper contexts, whether literary or external or psychological, are mischievous. and easily bring in misinterpretations. Incidentally, Wells himself experienced such a mischief done by a professional journalist. Hayakawa²⁴ says that:

"...the ignoring of contexts in any act of interpretation is at best a stupid practice. At its worst, it can be a vicious practice." ^[3]

By saying "ignoring," however, he would not ignore the possibility of dispensing with part of the whole context. Given the environment, or given the wider context, part of the context is determinative in interpretation.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

See also

^ 7. CONCLUSION
^ "The crucial point here is to select and collate carefully, and to present critically. So far this study has attempted to move toward his ideal."
Today the digital library community spends some effort on scanning, compression, and OCR; tomorrow it will have to focus almost exclusively on selection, searching, and quality assessment. Input will not matter as much as relevant choice. Missing information won't be on the tip of your tongue; it will be somewhere in your files. Or, perhaps, it will be in somebody else's files. With all of everyone's work online, we will have the opportunity first glimpsed by H. G. Wells (and a bit later and more concretely by Vannevar Bush) to let everyone use everyone else's intellectual effort. We could build a real `World Encyclopedia' with a true `planetary memory for all mankind' as Wells wrote in 1938. [Wells 1938]. He talked of ``knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest;`` we could do it. The challenge for librarians and computer scientists is to let us find the information we want in other people's work; and the challenge for the lawyers and economists is to arrange the payment structures so that we are encouraged to use the work of others rather than re-create it.
— Michael Lesk (1997) How Much Information Is There In the World? (Excerpt from Conclusion)
Note: He was a visiting professor at UCL.
Note: This unpublished is one of 11 articles Jim Gray recommended.
World Brain or Global Brain proponents tend to extrapolate quite extravagantly the capabilities and implications of emerging technology. For Wells it was microfilm. Today it is the infinitely more sophisticated Internet and World Wide Web which have enmeshed our globe in a fantastically intricate and diffused communications infrastructure. By means of this technology as World or Global Brain proponents imagine it taking shape, the effective deployment of the entire universe of knowledge will become possible. But this begs unresolved questions about the relative value of the individual and the state, about the nature of individual and social benefits and how they are best to be allocated, about what constitutes freedom and how it might be appropriately constrained. It flies in the face of the intransigent reality that what constitutes the ever-expanding store of human knowledge is almost incalculably massive in scale, is largely viewpoint-dependent, is fragmented, complex, ceaselessly in dispute and always under revision.
— W. Boyd Rayward (1999) "H. G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-Assessment." JASIS, 50: 557-579.
Note: He was also a visiting professor at UCL.
^ "...the ignoring of contexts in any act of interpretation is at best a stupid practice. At its worst, it can be a vicious practice."

[1] 7. CONCLUSION

[2] "The crucial point here is to select and collate carefully, and to present critically. So far this study has attempted to move toward his ideal."
Today the digital library community spends some effort on scanning, compression, and OCR; tomorrow it will have to focus almost exclusively on selection, searching, and quality assessment. Input will not matter as much as relevant choice. Missing information won't be on the tip of your tongue; it will be somewhere in your files. Or, perhaps, it will be in somebody else's files. With all of everyone's work online, we will have the opportunity first glimpsed by H. G. Wells (and a bit later and more concretely by Vannevar Bush) to let everyone use everyone else's intellectual effort. We could build a real `World Encyclopedia' with a true `planetary memory for all mankind' as Wells wrote in 1938. [Wells 1938]. He talked of ``knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest;`` we could do it. The challenge for librarians and computer scientists is to let us find the information we want in other people's work; and the challenge for the lawyers and economists is to arrange the payment structures so that we are encouraged to use the work of others rather than re-create it.
— Michael Lesk (1997) How Much Information Is There In the World? (Excerpt from Conclusion)
Note: He was a visiting professor at UCL.
Note: This unpublished is one of 11 articles Jim Gray recommended.
World Brain or Global Brain proponents tend to extrapolate quite extravagantly the capabilities and implications of emerging technology. For Wells it was microfilm. Today it is the infinitely more sophisticated Internet and World Wide Web which have enmeshed our globe in a fantastically intricate and diffused communications infrastructure. By means of this technology as World or Global Brain proponents imagine it taking shape, the effective deployment of the entire universe of knowledge will become possible. But this begs unresolved questions about the relative value of the individual and the state, about the nature of individual and social benefits and how they are best to be allocated, about what constitutes freedom and how it might be appropriately constrained. It flies in the face of the intransigent reality that what constitutes the ever-expanding store of human knowledge is almost incalculably massive in scale, is largely viewpoint-dependent, is fragmented, complex, ceaselessly in dispute and always under revision.
— W. Boyd Rayward (1999) "H. G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-Assessment." JASIS, 50: 557-579.
Note: He was also a visiting professor at UCL.

[3] "...the ignoring of contexts in any act of interpretation is at best a stupid practice. At its worst, it can be a vicious practice."

[1]

[2]

[3]