Today's class period was broken into two parts. During the first 45 minutes the class formed five discussion groups. Each group discussed three topics assigned from last class period (8/24).
Dr. Fox asked the class to limit the discussions to 15 minutes per topic, assign roles to each member of the group, and arrange additional group meetings if necessary.
During the last 30 minutes Dr. Fox began presenting the next unit of the course, namely, Information Retrieval (IR). He explained the importance of information during the ages. Emphasizing the importance of information in our lives, he mentioned that the time we live in has been labeled as the information age. "The most successful businesses around, are those dealing with computers and communications", he argued.
He, finally, went through an article by Blair & Maron. The main point of it was that there's always a trade-off between quantity/recall and the precision of information retrieval. This falls in the well-known 80-20 rule.
The first discussion section started today, with the class divided into six different groups (three questions for group). The groups were instructed to spend approximately 15 minutes per question, for a total of 45 minutes of discussion. During those 45 minutes, prof. Fox answered specific group questions.
The remaining 30 minutes were spent on lecture. First, prof. Fox took ten minutes to show the summaries already submitted to the WWW page, and addressed Mark Missana's questions. He answered his first question by saying that may not be the interest to completely substitute paper publications by electronic ones, but that it could certainly be done. As an answer to the second question, prof. Fox described the current Library of Congress initiatives. Finally, he stated that librarians and computer scientists are increasingly playing similar roles, and that maybe in the future the two roles will be interchangable. Stephen Williams pointed out that every computer scientist is becoming more and more aware of IS&R techniques and issues.
The last 20 minutes were spent introducing the next unit, and the first Blair and Maron article. The concepts of precision and recall were introduced.
Today's class began with a 45 minute small group discussion. This was followed by a short lecture/information session.
A link from the News/Announcement page called Summary1 listed two class diaries that had been written and some questions.
Dr. Fox alluded to the possibility that this could be accomplished, but the real question is not if we can achieve this but rather should we try to do this.
5 million works will be added to a digital library in the next five years.
Since major university programs in library science have been folding there may be no other choice. The answer will be imposed by society and economics.
Next we ventured into Unit 2. After a brief discussion of the required readings, Dr. Fox made these conclusions. Finding information is fundamental. We are in an information age and interest is building. Timely information is critical to wealth and successful business competition. Bill Gates and Walmart were given as examples. Lastly, rapid growth and large investment may be directly effected by information retrieval. Netscape went public with non-traditional results.
Examining the Blair & Maron article we were familiarized with a behavior graph were R represented recall and P represented precision. This graph was an instance of the 80-20 rule.
Today we spent the first forty five minutes on group discussions. There are five groups in the class. Each group took three topics and debated on both sides of a question.
Next we started the second unit IR discussion. The article written by Blair & Maron illustrates the relationship between precision and recall. There is a trade-off between those two: Higher the precision, lower the recall; Lower the precision, higher the recall. The following example reflects my understanding on this concept. It may not be correct. For example, a search program returns many answers for a particular search. However only one of them is what you are looking for. So its precision is low. On the other hand, the search program gives a few answers back and one of them is correct. The precision is higher because the recall is smaller.
Also we mentioned the 80-20 rule. In a library, only a small portion of whole collection is often borrowed. Just like in a program, the 20% of its statements is often used. The rest 80% is accessed only few times.
Today we devoted the first 45 minutes to discuss the issues from the Digital library unit. We were divided into five groups and each group was assigned three debate topics. The material for the debates was from the three articles assigned for this unit (FOXE88d, SAMU91a, DONG87). Each team is going to submit a short summary of what came out of the debates.
The remaining of the time was spent on the next unit which is Information Storage and Retrieval (IS&R). The professor pointed out the importance of information in our society and how quickly the information industry is growing. We live in the information age and finding information is becoming an essential human skill.
Next time we will continue talking about IS&R and talk about the Blair & Maron controversy.
The first 45 minutes of the class were spent with different groups discussing their respective topics for the debate. Once this was done the lecture commenced with information on how to access the articles for this course on-line. This can now be done through Netscape or Mosaic. We then discussed a few questions on Digital Libraries in general posed by students. The next unit on Information Retrieval and Storage was started with a brief explanation of what the readings were about. We went over the importance of information -- how it is fundamental to human nature especially in the current information age and how computers can help us to access information. Lastly, we began a discussion on the Blair & Maron controversy, and were told about the 80-20 rule and the relationship between precision and recall. The relevance of this relationship to information storage and retrieval was demonstrated through the means of a case study conducted by Blair & Maron.
The class began with each group (as made in the previous class) sitting together and discussing the 3 topics assigned. The topics assigned to our group were no.6,8 and 11.
Topic 6
Everybody agreed that though a lot of standards exist only
a few are popular and succesful and hence they survive. Hence too
many standards isn't really the main reason preventing people from buying
into new technology. As far as the question of 'little user-oriented
access software' goes, the Web browsers are good examples. The
tremendous success of WWW has proved that given the 'right technology'
people will buy it.
Topic 8
It certainly is going to be very easy to copy material due to
the very nature of digital information. Hence international copyright
violation is surely going to be a major problem.
Topic 11
There are two sides to having multiple copies of each work.
Such 'distributed storage' does optimize performance but it may create
other problems associated with distributed control such as security
of the material from illegal copying and data/information consistency.
The second half of the class began with the unit 2, Information Retrieval (IR). The importance of information retrieval was discussed. Finding the correct information is an essential human skill and it comes intuitively to man in many forms. We live in the information age and computers can help us manage information. The working of large corporations depends on getting the right information in time.
The discussion then shifted to the controversial Blair-Maron article. We learned about the 80-20 rule in general and how it comes into play in IR. The relationship between precision (P) and recall (R) was discussed. According to the 80-20 rule about 20 % recall is typical.
Today the class divided into groups of five and discussed the topics assigned to them by Dr.Fox. Our group - Mark Missana, Fred Drake, Markus Groener, Mike Keenan and myself discussed the first three topics. The discussion was very interesting and stimulating and we touched various subjects in the debate. We reached consensus on the three topics and also divided the writing work.
The unit 2 was then introduced. It focussed on what an important role information plays in the world - information that is relevant and timely. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is timely information more than anything else that will be responsible for success in various fields in future. Also, the Blair and Maron article was discussed.
The class was break into 5 groups. Each group discussed about their 3 topics. My group topic were 7,8,and 9. We talked about copyright and derivative works. Everyone can be a publisher as well as a reader in digital libraries due to the number of everyone-produced homepages. We must to enforce the one who want to access and use data to pay for their use ( pay-per-use ). We started new unit, IR , after discussion.