RE: Expert Systems? or Knowledge Management?

["Jennifer Freeman" <basilisk -at- acm -dot- org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Itowsley -at- aol -dot- com [mailto:Itowsley -at- aol -dot- com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 6:43 PM
> To: basilisk -at- acm -dot- org; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
> Subject: Re: Expert Systems? or Knowledge Management?
>
>
> Uh, librarians have been doing this for over 2 millenia.
<snip>
> All of the (non-programming) skills librarians are taught are the same as
> those for creating knowledge management systems and expert systems.  I've
> worked in the area and the work of Ranganathan is some of the
> most important
> ever done.  (He is the librarian who invented the Colon
> Classification System
> - a system used in India and most non-English speaking countries
> to classify
> information for retrieval.  Yahoo is based off of this paradigm.)

Thanks for the information, although I don't quite see what comments I made
in my post provoked this.

I was just trying to say that we needed to be more clear about terms.  The
poster I replied to kept using the term "expert system" when I felt he was
really talking about "knowledge management". I wanted to point out that the
term "expert system" already has a very precise technical meaning in the
world of Artificial Intelligence.  It is one specific type of AI computer
program, created and used in a specific manner.

> Librarians - especially catalogers and classification experts - have been
> doing this for a _very_ _long_ time.  Remember, it is very
> amusing to me to
> watch as the computer world rediscovers library science.
> Admittedly, much of
> it has been forgotten by most of the library world which has been
> preoccupied
> with full-text search and visible customer service issues.  Thesaurus
> building, indexing, classification theory, all of these are
> integral parts of
> creating expert systems.
<snip>

I would agree that library-science-type skills such as classification,
thesaurus building, etc. could be useful to someone creating expert systems,
but as someone who has studied such programs, I feel they are probably not
as useful as skills such as computer programming, statistics, and high order
logic.  (In fact, if you program it right, you shouldn't have to do much
classification or synonym defining at all. The expert system should be able
to discover such things on its own if you feed it sufficient quantities of
reliable raw data.  That's the part that makes it Artificial
_Intelligence_.)

Perhaps you are trying to say that AI researchers have boggarted the term
"expert system" from millenia of library science research?  If so, I
apologize for not realizing it had a different original meaning; I had never
heard a library scientist use the term.

-Jennifer Freeman
 basilisk -at- acm -dot- org





^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Develop HTML-based Help with Macromedia Dreamweaver! (STC Discount.)
**NEW DATE/LOCATION!** January 16-17, 2001, New York, NY.
http://www.weisner.com/training/dreamweaver_help.htm or 800-646-9989.

Sponsored by SOLUTIONS, Conferences and Seminars for Communicators 
Publications Management Clinic, TECH*COMM 2001 Conference, and more 
http://www.SolutionsEvents.com or 800-448-4230

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit 
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.