World Wide Web Information Research Articles

A Metastrategy for World-Wide Web Information Retrieval in Clinical Medicine

The metastrategy for World-Wide Web information retrieval was presented as an integrated approach to end-user searching in clinical medicine, although its application may be made to any search for WWW information. Certain distinctions, such as between anticipated and unanticipated clinical information needs and between WWW catalogs for retrieving Web sites and WWW databases for retrieving Web pages, were made. These distinctions are important in the end-user strategy because they help maximize the productivity of the WWW for clinicians.

Providing Extension Information Electronically—Easing the Transition From a Paper-Based System

Cooperative Extension has relied heavily on the distribution of printed materials to accomplish its mission of providing research-based educational materials to agricultural producers and consumers. As the costs of print media have escalated and budgets have been reduced, Extension has continually sought more efficient and effective alternatives. World Wide Web information servers are central to this task, since they are relatively inexpensive to set up and operate, and can deliver high-quality materials for on-screen viewing or printing on demand. Recent developments (specifically the WebTV network) indicate the Web to be the medium of choice for Extension delivery systems. In addition to providing electronic versions of publications, slide shows, and video clips, most Web browsers also support e-mail and interactive forms for obtaining information from the client. Analysis of Web server logs and guest registers can be used to determine client use patterns to address issues of access and accountability. The current and next generations of most word processing, page layout, and presentation software offer Web-ready layout as one saving option.

Horizontal Wires Replace the Vertical Files

Traditionally, clippings of newspaper articles, pictures from magazines, pamphlets, charts, graphs, posters, proceedings, or copies thereof, and other miscellaneous information sources have been stored in vertical files in libraries. The practice of creating and maintaining vertical files is extremely time consuming. In a medical library, in particular, old information about diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis can quickly become incorrect, misleading, and possibly armful. Adequately tending to the vertical files can require a librarian to create a balancing act between properly maintaining vertical files and meeting the needs of the users in other areas of the library. The maintenance of vertical files is, by nature, highly consumptive of paper and space consuming. A reasonable alternative to the traditional vertical files is the World-Wide Web. Search engines exist for locating specific information, and bookmarks and/or links which point users to particularly useful sites can be set in search software. Some methods for searching are discussed, and a variety of World-Wide Web information sources are offered.

Futures in global space//www.models.gis.media: [BBR]1[/BBR

Geographers deal with global and local space and their interrelationships and thus bring new insights, perspectives, and methods to global questions. This is appealing to futurists since the principle of ‘think globally-act locally’ has been an inspiration for many years. In this paper I explore how old and new approaches in geography, as well as new information technologies such as the World Wide Web (WWW) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), might contribute to global modeling. I briefly review also the history of global economy models to discover lessons for future attempts to construct global models, not least how prevailing paradigms and institutional expediency determine the intellectual effort, and its impact. I then describe some of the new directions being undertaken by global modelers, quantitative geographers and regional scientists in the 1990s, and the possibilities and challenges for the next few years, and their contribution to the knowledge building process and its context.

Web information quality as seen from the libraries

Discusses different types of quality problems having their roots in the Internet and some possible solutions. Gives a provisional definition of “World Wide Web information quality”. Presents some of the findings from an empirical survey of Danish academic and business users of the Internet. Concludes that only natural intelligence will be able to cope with the enormous task of filtering and distilling usable and useful information needles from the Internet haystack. Development of new and more efficient tools for the retrieval of quality information is extremely urgent.

ACS opens ChemCenter web site for chemical info

The American Chemical Society has taken another aggressive step into the world of electronic information services with the introduction of ChemCenter— a bookmark site on the World Wide Web for information about the chemical sciences—at the society's fall national meeting. We think it's going to be the one great place to find material about chemistry, ACS President Ronald Breslow said in announcing ChemCenter. Breslow says the new service pulls together existing ACS information on the web with an array of new services for chemists, other scientists, and the general public. ChemCenter rapidly became a topic of conversation among meeting attendees—including ChemCenter competitors—who stood in line at the ACS exposition booth for on-line demonstrations. ChemCenter is a premiere on-line service it is available now and because it contains the most in-depth information of any Internet service for chemists today from the most trusted name in chemistry-related sciences, says Director of ACS Special P...

Case-based conceptual design information server for concurrent engineering

Conceptual design requires processing information from diverse sources in order to define the functional requirements, operating constraints, and evaluation criteria pertinent to accomplishing a prescribed goal. Historically, the design process focused on the functionality of an artifact for the end customer. Concurrent engineering broadens this focus to account for the concerns of ‘customers’ not previously considered — those along the entire life cycle of an artifact, i.e. marketing, design, manufacture, distribution, operation and disposal. Expanding the design focus to include all of these customers places far greater informational demands on the designer. Case-based reasoning applies experience stored in a computerized form to solving similar problems in slightly altered contexts. It has been applied successfully to routine design where both the form and the content of design information can be encoded symbolically and manipulated using artificial intelligence techniques. Concurrent conceptual design presents unique problems for such an approach because design information must be considered at many levels of abstraction and from many viewpoints. We describe an approach that provides the designer with case-based conceptual design information stored in the richly expressive medium of hypermedia (hypertext incorporating multimedia). Design cases of industry ‘best practices’ in concurrent engineering are indexed to provide access through multiple interfaces, allowing the user to browse, explore, or pinpoint design case information. The Conceptual Design Information Server (CDIS) is implemented using emerging internet standards, such as those associated with the World Wide Web (WWW) and Wide Area Information Service (WAIS), coupled to a robust Structured Query Language (SQL) database and traditional cad packages.

A world wide web gateway to the radiologic learning file

Computer networks in general, and the Internet specifically, are changing the way information is manipulated in the world at large and in radiology. The goal of this project was to develop a computer system in which images from the Radiologic Learning File, available previously only via a single-user laser disc, are made available over a generic, high-availability computer network to many potential users simultaneously. Using a networked workstation in our laboratory and freely available distributed hypertext software, we established a World Wide Web (WWW) information server for radiology. Images from the Radiologic Learning File are requested through the WWW client software, digitized from a single laser disc containing the entire teaching file and then transmitted over the network to the client. The text accompanying each image is incorporated into the transmitted document. The Radiologic Learning File is now on-line, and requests to view the cases result in the delivery of the text and images. Image digitization via a frame grabber takes 1/30th of a second. Conversion of the image to a standard computer graphic format takes 45-60 sec. Text and image transmission speed on a local area network varies between 200 and 400 kilobytes (KB) per second depending on the network load. We have made images from a laser disc of the Radiologic Learning File available through an Internet-based hypertext server. The images previously available through a single-user system located in a remote section of our department are now ubiquitously available throughout our department via the department's computer network. We have thus converted a single-user, limited functionality system into a multiuser, widely available resource.

Creating a web analysis and visualization environment

Due to the rapid growth of the World-Wide Web, resource discovery has become an increasing problem. As an answer to the demand for information management, a third generation of World-Wide Web tools will evolve: Information gathering and processing agents. This paper describes WAVE (Web Analysis and Visualization Environment), a 3D interface for World-Wide Web information visualization and browsing. It uses the mathematical theory of concept analysis to conceptually cluster objects. So-called “conceptual scales” for attributes, such as location, title, keywords, topic, size, or modification time, provide a formal mechanism that automatically classifies and categorizes documents, creating a conceptual information space. A visualization shell serves as an ergonomically sound user interface for exploring this information space.

Introducing the Internet.

The benefits to medical practitioners of using the Internet are growing rapidly as the Internet becomes easier to use and ever more biomedical resources become available on line. The Internet is the largest computer network in the world; it is also a virtual community, larger than many nation states, with its own rules of behaviour or "netiquette." There are several types of Internet connection and various ways of acquiring a connection. Once connected, you can obtain, free of charge, programs that allow easy use of the Internet's resources and help on how to use these resources; you can access many of these resources through the hypertext references in the on line version of this series (go to http:@www.bmj.com/bmj/ to reach the electronic version). You can then explore the various methods for accessing, manipulating, or disseminating data on the Internet, such as electronic mail, telnet, file transfer protocol, and the world wide web. Results from a search of the world wide web for information on the rare condition of Recklinghausen's neurofibromatosis illustrate the breadth of medical information available on the Internet.

The World-Wide Web information system: chemical chaos or global scientific enabler?

A proposed Internet based standard based on primary chemical MIME types used in conjunction with the World-Wide Web information delivery systems allows molecular structural and spectroscopic information to be transparently integrated into scientific publications, providing unparalleled access and control for the user. Examples of “hyperactive molecules” from the areas of organic synthesis, quantitative structural modelling, molecular dynamics, crystallography, NMR and mass spectrometry are discussed. The implications of these mechanisms for scientific publication in general, the impact on the quality and reproducibility of published experimental data and the enhancement of serendipitous discoveries are discussed.

The world-wide web information system: chemical chaos or global scientific enabler?

A proposed Internet based standard based on primary chemical MIME types used in conjunction with the World-Wide Web information delivery systems allows molecular structural and spectroscopic information to be transparently integrated into scientific publications, providing unparalleled access and control for the user. Examples of “hyperactive molecules” from the areas of organic synthesis, quantitative structural modelling, molecular dynamics, crystallography, NMR and mass spectrometry are discussed. The implications of these mechanisms for scientific publication in general, the impact on the quality and reproducibility of published experimental data and the enhancement of serendipitous discoveries are discussed.

Mailing to the machine

Electronic mail is generally thought of as a means of communicating and interacting with other people, either one-to-one or one-to-few, by personal e-mail, or else by participation in electronic discussion groups. However, electronic mail can also be used as an interface to a quite comprehensive range of Internet information retrieval util ities, where the communication is with machines rather than people. Tools and services accessible by e-mail include: searching and retrieval from Bitnet e-mail list archives; archie searches of files available at anonymous FTP (file-transfer protocol) sites; file retrieval from anony mous FTP sites; browsing of menus and retrieval from gopher menus; 'veronica' index searches of gopher infor mation; retrieval of World Wide Web information; searching and retrieval from WAIS (wide-area information server) information sources; reading and contribution to Usenet newsgroups; directory services, such as 'whois' and 'finger', for locating people and their e-mail addresses.

Interactive information services using World-Wide Web hypertext

Most World-Wide Web information servers provide simple browsing access to collections of static text or hypertext files. This paper describes some interactive World-Wide Web servers that produce information displays and documents dynamically rather than just providing access to static files. The PARC Map Viewer uses a geographic database to create and display maps of any part of the world on demand. The Digital Tradition folk music server provides access to a large database of song lyrics and melodies. These applications take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of World-Wide Web to deliver graphical and audio content as well as formatted text. Hypertext links are used not only for navigation, but also for setting search and presentation parameters. In these applications the HTML format and the HTTP protocol are used like a user interface tool kit to provide not only document retrieval but a complete custom user interface specialized for the application.