History of Information Retrieval
Information retrieval is the process of searching within a document collection for a particular information need (called a query).
Although dominated by recent events following the invention of the computer, information retrieval actually has a long and glorious tradition.
The earliest document collections were recorded on the painted walls of caves. A cave dweller interested in searching a collection of cave paintings to answer a particular information query had to travel by foot, and stand, staring in front of each painting.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to collect and artifact without being gruesome.
Before the invention of paper, ancient Romans and Greeks recorded information on papyrus rolls.
Some papyrus artifacts from ancient Rome had tags attached to the rolls. These tags were an ancient form of today’s Post-it Note, and make an excellent addition to our museum.
A tag contained a short summary of the rolled document and was attached in order to save readers from unnecessarily unraveling a long irrelevant document.
These abstract also appeared in oral form. At the start of Greek plays in the fifth century B.C., the chorus recited an abstract of the ensuing action.
While no actual classifications scheme has survived from the artifacts of Greek and Roman libraries, we do know that another elementary information retrieval tool, the table of content, first appeared in Greek scrolls from the second century B.C.
As the stories goes, the Libraries of Pergamum threatened to overtake the celebrated Library of Alexandria as the best Library in the world, claiming the largest collection of papyrus rolls.
As the result, the Egyptians ceased the supply of papyrus to Pergamum, so the Pergamenians invented an alternative writing material parchment, which is made from thin layers of animal skin.
Unlike papyrus, parchment did not roll easily, so scribes folded several sheets of parchment and sewed them into books.
Other documents collections sprung up in a variety of fields. This dramatically accelerated with the re-invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1450.
The wealthy proudly boasted of their private libraries and public libraries were instituted in America in the 1700s at the prompting of Benjamin Franklin.
More orderly ways of maintaining records of a collection’s holdings were devised.
These inventions were progress, yet still search was not completely in the hands of the information seeker. It took the inventions of the digital computer (1940s and 1950s) and the subsequent inventions of computerized search systems to move forward that goal.
The first computerized search systems used special syntax to automatically retrieve book and article information related to a user’s query.
Unfortunately, the cumbersome syntax kept search largely in the domain of libraries trained on the systems.
In1989 the storage, access and searching of document collections was revolutions by and invention named the World Wide Web by its founder Tim Berners-Lee.
Of course, our museum must include artifacts from this revolution such as a webpage, some HTML, and a hyperlink or two.
The World Wide Web became the ultimate signal of the dominance of the Information Age and the death of the Industrial Age.
Yet despite the revolution in information storage and access ushered in by the Web users initialing web searches found themselves floundering.
They were looking for the proverbial needle in an enormous, ever growing information haystack.
Al this change in 1998 when link analysis hit the information retrieval scene. The most successful search engines began using link analysis, technique that exploited the additional information inherent in the hyperlink structure of the Web, to improve the quality of search results.
Web search improved dramatically, and web searchers religiously used and promoted their favorite engines like Google and AltaVista.
History of Information Retrieval
Monday, July 13, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
World Class Performance
World Class Performance
World class is a term coined by Dick Schonberger, consultant and author of Building a Chain of Customers, to describe organization which is consistently held in the highest regard by its customer, and can therefore compete successfully in world markets.
Tom Peters, another America, author of In Search of Excellence, Liberation Management and Beyond Hierarchy, describes these organizations as excellent.
They both agree that somehow, these organizations are consistently able to meet and often exceed their customers’ expectations.
This kind of exceptional performance cannot happen by chance; it must be made to happen by getting everyone in organization to work constantly toward that goal.
Why? Because customer expectations are constantly rising.
What we as consumers are delighted with today, we come to expect tomorrow and so any organizations that stands still on quality and customer service will soon fall behind.
Unfortunately, however, until recently most western organizations were saddled with a crippling handicap that had to be unburdened before they could hope to achieve excellence.
This handicap was an all-pervading heritage familiar to everyone at work.
It has always been there, we could not imagine life without it, and it was seldom questioned.
It was of course the ‘command and control’ system with these near the top of the tree making the decision for the rest lower down.
It’s incredible to think that towards the end of the twentieth century, most people at work in organizations of any size sill found themselves constrained by a structure first adopted thousands of years ago.
It was appropriate for the Roman army, and for businesses during the reign of Queen Victoria, because then, populations consisted, mostly of uneducated masses, with only a small, educated elite equipped to take charge of them.
But that changed half a century ago, with an educated majority in developed nations.
What a waste of potential: all those educated people in the lower half of the tree with ideas about their jobs and no opportunity to use them.
World Class Performance
World class is a term coined by Dick Schonberger, consultant and author of Building a Chain of Customers, to describe organization which is consistently held in the highest regard by its customer, and can therefore compete successfully in world markets.
Tom Peters, another America, author of In Search of Excellence, Liberation Management and Beyond Hierarchy, describes these organizations as excellent.
They both agree that somehow, these organizations are consistently able to meet and often exceed their customers’ expectations.
This kind of exceptional performance cannot happen by chance; it must be made to happen by getting everyone in organization to work constantly toward that goal.
Why? Because customer expectations are constantly rising.
What we as consumers are delighted with today, we come to expect tomorrow and so any organizations that stands still on quality and customer service will soon fall behind.
Unfortunately, however, until recently most western organizations were saddled with a crippling handicap that had to be unburdened before they could hope to achieve excellence.
This handicap was an all-pervading heritage familiar to everyone at work.
It has always been there, we could not imagine life without it, and it was seldom questioned.
It was of course the ‘command and control’ system with these near the top of the tree making the decision for the rest lower down.
It’s incredible to think that towards the end of the twentieth century, most people at work in organizations of any size sill found themselves constrained by a structure first adopted thousands of years ago.
It was appropriate for the Roman army, and for businesses during the reign of Queen Victoria, because then, populations consisted, mostly of uneducated masses, with only a small, educated elite equipped to take charge of them.
But that changed half a century ago, with an educated majority in developed nations.
What a waste of potential: all those educated people in the lower half of the tree with ideas about their jobs and no opportunity to use them.
World Class Performance
Saturday, May 30, 2009
New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools
New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools
The solution to the problem of a poor analytical environment in a company with multiple data source, different report writers and lack of analytical tools can be implemented a data warehouse with modern business intelligence software as a front end for the users.
With modern ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools and most databases vendors now supporting open standards protocols it is finally becoming feasible for companies to implement data-warehouses that can be updated and maintained with relative case.
The result is a common data, repository, which provides decision makers with endless possibilities for investigating (data mining) and analyzing variances, trends and exceptions.
Because a modern business intelligence solution feeds off a frequently updated data-warehouse that includes detailed information it becomes much more than just a tool for executives (like the old executive information systems, but it can become a tool for any person within the organization or related to it who needs easy and fast access to summarized and detailed information from across the company’s databases.
New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools
The solution to the problem of a poor analytical environment in a company with multiple data source, different report writers and lack of analytical tools can be implemented a data warehouse with modern business intelligence software as a front end for the users.
With modern ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools and most databases vendors now supporting open standards protocols it is finally becoming feasible for companies to implement data-warehouses that can be updated and maintained with relative case.
The result is a common data, repository, which provides decision makers with endless possibilities for investigating (data mining) and analyzing variances, trends and exceptions.
Because a modern business intelligence solution feeds off a frequently updated data-warehouse that includes detailed information it becomes much more than just a tool for executives (like the old executive information systems, but it can become a tool for any person within the organization or related to it who needs easy and fast access to summarized and detailed information from across the company’s databases.
New Breed of Business Intelligence Tools
Friday, May 1, 2009
Operating Systems
Operating Systems
The most important system software package for any computer is its operating system.
An operating system is an integrated system of programs that manages the operations of the CPU, controls the input/output and storage resources and activities of the computer systems, and provide various support services as the computer executes the application program of users.
The primary purpose of an operating system is to maximize the productivity of a computer system by operating it in the most efficient manner.
An operating system minimizes the amount of human intervention required during processing.
It helps application programs perform common operations such as accessing a network, entering data, savings and retrieving files, and printing or displaying output.
If anybody hands on experience on computer will know that operating system, must be loaded and activated before you can accomplish other tasks.
This emphasizes the fact that the operating system is the most indispensible components of the software interface between users and the hardware of their computer system.
Operating Systems
The most important system software package for any computer is its operating system.
An operating system is an integrated system of programs that manages the operations of the CPU, controls the input/output and storage resources and activities of the computer systems, and provide various support services as the computer executes the application program of users.
The primary purpose of an operating system is to maximize the productivity of a computer system by operating it in the most efficient manner.
An operating system minimizes the amount of human intervention required during processing.
It helps application programs perform common operations such as accessing a network, entering data, savings and retrieving files, and printing or displaying output.
If anybody hands on experience on computer will know that operating system, must be loaded and activated before you can accomplish other tasks.
This emphasizes the fact that the operating system is the most indispensible components of the software interface between users and the hardware of their computer system.
Operating Systems
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