From sand to circuits and other inquiries

Book reviews ment. From an historical and comparative point of view. the book certainly offers a most useful contribution. A few unsigned cartoons separate the successive sections. Both their design style and themes (a poor world or human plagued with obsolete forms of information technology) summarize quite well our own perception of the message presented in this book, if not the author’s one. We might briefly mention a few particular points. Mr Rosza advocates in several instances that the library is convivial as opposed to the artificiality and abstractness of computerized information delivery. Other lovers of libraries, like Borges or Eco (see in particular Umberto Eco’s compulsory reading for information specialists: De bibliotheca, in: Sette anni di desiderio. Milan, 1983, Bompiani, pp. 2377250) contend that this trait is still an ideal which may never be attained. As the book also concerns itself with information policy, one really wonders if conservative governments really govern while they do not systematically burn libraries (although they often do burn books), when noting after Mr Rdsza that Marx wrote Dus Kupital in the library of the British Museum (what he takes as the ground for recognizing it, the British Museum library, not the book, as archetype of the most effective information system), where anyone could have met and shared with him his subversive thoughts. Mr Rosza also rightly points out that the use of computers is only a means to an end and that they may do more harm than good (particularly, we may add, if you do not have suitable ones at hand), unless used in a state of ‘institutional maturity’. Unfortunately, the book does not tell one how to assess whether this state has been reached before switching on one’s laptop. Thus it may be only on the observation of failures that its prior absence could be witnessed. But is it not the case that maturity may result from evolution and could be gained by experimentation or simple use of oversophisticated tools and processes? One may ask whether humankind has ever been culturally or institutionally mature enough to prop-

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erly use the many tools its technological genius has provided in steadily growing variety and destruction capacity. Machines, not social needs, breed machines, which afterwards look for some profitable function even at the cost of reshaping around their requirements nature, society and human beings. Information technology is no except ion The difficulty of reaching maturity is perhaps best illustrated by the UN information systems and Mr Rosza’a considerations on them. It is, in retrospect, refreshing to find a quotation of the almost forgotten Jackson report whose suggestions towards the improvement of coherence seem to have been systematically contradicted. One might wonder. however, if adding an artificial structure to the existing ones. as he suggests in one of his papers, is likely to alleviate their basic drawbacks. When a body loses control over its organs, there is something wrong with the central nervous system, if not worse. Mr Rosza is not less right when pointing to the negative consequences of the northern style specialization of the institutional structures of the developing countries. Here again, it is doubtful that the so-called BACIN concept, which is some kind of NATIS coloured version of the old favourite ‘national centre’, could do any better. The multiplication of de facto autonomous specialized bodies, and the parallel proliferation of their information services and activities, is a fact of life which calls for a fresh look at the scope and organization of information systems, with a drastic departure from the ‘scientific and technical’ perspective which it is time to substitute by information resources management.

Information

M.J. Menou Systems Consultant, France

John J. Simon, Jr. (Editor). From sand to circuits and other irzquiries. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Office for Information Technology, 1086. xi+271 pp. ISBN 0 646 32575 3. f19.95. This book presents

a collection

of 24

articles originally published in the Harvard University Informatim Technology Newsletter between 1983 and 1985 on a wide range of topics from the physics of semiconductor devices to their application for, for instance, computer-aided learning and cataloguing services. The four authors cover, at an intelligent teenager level, and in a style falling somewhere nearer to that of the Reader’s Digest than that of the Scientific Arnericarl, the kind of new technology which is increasingly being used in information and communicntion (including education) services, a technology which is being taken for granted by the teenagers but also one which creates both threats and opportunities in the industrial and services sectors of the economy not dissimilar to those created by machines and chemical products in the agricultural sector over the past 150 years or so. On the whole the authors confine themselves to the factual description of various devices and of their mode of operation, leaving the implications (threats and opportunities) to others to discuss. Building up from the semiconductor through the microchip to the microcomputer, the topic then moves to telecommunications by digital telephony (with an aside at the break-up of the Bell system in the USA) and via satellites, xerography and computeraided typesetting, the videodisc, computer graphics, artificial intelligence. robotics. the Ifarvard University conputerized catalogue, bibliographic database access via a microcomputer, and, finally, computer-aided learning (‘being a brief history of, and inquiry into, the presence of computers on campuses’). There is also a selected bibliography of cited works, and short lists of further reading for each chapter. A book such as this will date: slowly for the more fundamental topics, such as the physics of semiconductors, rapidly when discussing actual systems, such as library catalogues. The bias is towards concentrating on US achievements (but British, German. or Russian publications would most likely suffer from a similar national bias). Imprecise, potentially mislead-

Book reviews

ini-5 statements

include one that Arthur C. Clarke (an early member of the British Interplanetary Society and in 1945 a RAF radar instructor and subsequently a King’s College, University of London, physics graduate) was ‘a British postal clerk turned science writer’ (p. 66) and that satellite broadcast signal strength in the central region covered reaches ‘typically 36dBW’ (i.e., 4kW) (p. 74), rather than this figure represents the EIRP (Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power), i.e., the signal strength equivalent to that which would be produced at this location by a source in the position of the satellite radiating this power uniformly in all directions. The book could have been improved by the provision of an index (which might have also served as an example of computer-aided index production). Nevertheless, this collection of articles can serve as a useful introduction to the various topics for the nonspecialist who wishes to learn something about the how and what-for of IT.

University

H. Schur of Sheffield, UK

Irene Wormell (Editor). Knowledge engineering: Expert systems and information retrieval. London: Taylor-Graham, 1988. 182 pp. ISBN 0 947.568 30 1. f19.50. Knowledge engineering: Expert systems and information retrieval is the product of a NORDINFO seminar held in Copenhagen at the Royal School of Librarianship in December 1986. The aim of the seminar was to ‘bridge artificial intelligence and information retrieval in order to establish a mutual basis for transfer of theories and techniques’. The keynote paper by Karen Sparck Jones, ‘Architecture Problems in the construction of expert systems for document retrieval’, discusses the requirements for an intelligent interface to document retrieval systems such as Dialog with reference to two projects. The first, by Brooks, identified functions for such an interface through detailed analysis of interviews be-

tween intermediaries and users; these functions require knowledge currently applied by the intermediary. The separate functions lead Brooks and her associates, notably Nick Belkin, to propose a distributed expert system model. Although the functions are further analysed to reveal subfunction goals this work remains ‘very much a preliminary clearing of the ground for the design of a comprehensive intellifor gent interface’, as no mechanisms performing these are specified. The second project, by Pollitt. focuses on the provision of an interface for clinicians to access the MEDLINE database for queries on cancer therapy. The approach taken avoided the analysis of intermediary-user dialogue, as performed by Brooks, by concentrating on the knowledge structures in the database, basing the CANSEARCH interface on an extraction from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) controlled vocabulary. The system was rule-based, with blackboards used for message handling between rules, and produced search statements after users made selections from touch screen menus. Pollitt’s CANSEARCH However, only implements one of the functions identified by Brooks, that of retrieval strategy, with no user modelling or problem description (or context) catered for. Sparck Jones then examines the implications of the two projects in respect of control, blackboards, messages and the experts’ communication language in the construction of future systems. The conclusions are that ‘it is not obvious whether a bottom-up proceeding incrementally strategy, from CANSEARCH, would be productive in the long run’, and that ‘it is equally clear there can be no starting, from the Belkin and top-down, Brooks model in its current informal form’. Yet it is suggested that progress could be made by considering the distributed model with simplified functions, and trying to integrate these functions into a comprehensive system Erik Hollnagel’s paper, ‘Cognitive models, cognitive tasks and information retrieval’, makes a good followup to the keynote paper by defining a

cognitive approach to modelling both user and computer. Information processing models developed for the specification and design of computer systems were inadequate for modelling the more functionally complex human computer interactions. ‘The cognitive system produces “intelligent action”, that is its behaviour is goal oriented, based on symbol manipulation and uses knowledge of the world (heuristic knowledge) for guidance ’ The models, both computer and human, are built following cognitive task analysis which results in a goalsmeans network, the goal being a ‘specification of a target state . or the criteria for a solution’, the means being the functions or processes and how these are implemented. Three levels of system representation are presented as surface knowledge (as in the user of a TV set), shallow knowledge (as in the driver of a car) and deep knowledge (such as that possessed by the system designer). Hollnagel states that the user must understand how the system works to retrieve the information he needs and describes the ways in which transparency can be built into the system through explanations and descriptions. The basis for this seems unclear given that the cognitive tasks in the system concern the process of information retrieval and the user is primarily concerned with the information to be retrieved. Unfortunately no pointers are given to an implementation of these ideas although they do suggest a workable method which could presumably employ an appropriate degree of ‘transparency’. Mayoh’s ‘Are Brian paper, machines as good as people at drawing conclusions from knowledge represented in catalogues, data bases and expert systems?‘, comes to no particular conclusion but raises the interesting prospect of ‘day dreaming’ computers using up otherwise idle time by reviewing catalogue cards. Eero Sormunen with a paper titled ‘A knowledge-based intermediary system for information retrieval’ returns to the focus of the seminar with a down-to-earth look at the requirements of an intermediary system. The issues covered include command and

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