Date: Thu, 20 Feb 86 18:45:35 est To: fox Subject: IRList Digest V2 #10 Status: R IRList Digest Thursday, 20 Feb 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 10 Today's Topics: Email - Old address for ACM SIGIR Forum Co-editor - New address for C. Eastman Query - Need help to get info. on AI Societies Announcement - Interesting Office Inf. Sys. Articles, role of B. Croft Book Review - Information and Misinformation Cog-Sci Seminars - ICOT work on deductive DB and relational KB ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bitnet%"RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1" 18-FEB-1986 15:32 Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1986 13:23 CST From: Vijay V. Raghavan Subject: disconnected from UUCP Dear Ed, ... I am sending this message to advice you that our connection to the UUCP network has been disconnected for some indefinite period of time due to some financial difficulties. Thus, I can no longer be reached via ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.arpa . . . ... my BITNET address ... be the only path available for some time. If possible, you could make mention of this fact in the next IR digest. My BITNET address is Raghavan@UREGINA1. Thanks. With regards, Vijay ------------------------------ From: Caroline Eastman Return-Path: Date: Wed, 12 Feb 86 15:24:14 est I am now at the University of South Carolina and back on the networks. I would like to get on irlist and get back issues if possible. Caroline M. Eastman Department of Computer Science University of South Carolina Columbia, SC 29208 (803) 777-8103 I am told that feasible paths here include akgua!usceast and cnc!ncsu!ncrcae!usceast ------------------------------ From: "Don Walker at mouton.ARPA" Date: Sun, 9 Feb 86 23:25:15 est Subject: NEED INFORMATION ON AI SOCIETIES; PLEASE HELP I am preparing a short article on associations, societies, and related organizations in artificial intelligence. For each, I would appreciate receiving the following kind of information: name; purpose; date of establishment; principal people involved in getting it started; important events in its history; publications, conferences, and other activities; current membership (if relevant); and any other items of special interest. I would like to put the set of organizations in some historical perspective, if possible. Pointers to other places where something like this has already been done would be particularly helpful, and copies of same would be even moreso. Needless to say, net transmission is most efficient, as the deadline is uncomfortably close. And I would particularly value finding someone who would be interested in helping put all this information together! I would expect to include SIGART, ACL, ICCL, AISB, IJCAII, AAAI, CSS, CSCSI, ECCAI, and as many other national and regional groups as possible. Please help if you can; share with me what you have available, even if you think you may not be the most appropriate person to do so; and help get this message out to the people who should know. Net messages to walker@mouton.arpa, walker%mouton@csnet-relay, or ucbvax(or ihnp4, etc.)!bellcore!walker; mail to Don Walker (EAI) Bell Communications Research 445 South Street, MRE 2A379 Morristown, NJ 07960, USA I am sending this notice to publications as well as bboards, digests, and people, but note that the time is too short to justify actually printing it in most of them. Instead, the editors should respond themselves or route it to those most likely to have the information. ------------------------------ From: "Robert B. Allen at lafite.UUCP" Date: Mon, 10 Feb 86 07:41:40 est Subject: TOOIS I looked in Bellcore's log of the IRlist and found the TOOIS abstracts and the COIS announcement, but I didn't find the note I had sent to you giving the titles for the January, '86 TOOIS. There still seems to be some intermittent failure in the mail from NJ to you -- I've mentioned this to Bruce Ballard and he also claims to have had trouble. [Note: V2 # 2 had this announcement but since it is so important and interesting and since some of you missed it, here are the details. I hope that mail is working better now that I am distributing from Seismo. Please let me know of other problems! - Ed] Ed, The January, 1986 issue of the ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems has several papers which may be of interest to readers of irlist: R.H. Trigg and M. Weiser TEXTNET: A Network-Based Approach to Text Handling W.P. Jones and S.T. Dumais Spatial and Symbolic Filing J. Donahue and J. Widom Whiteboards: A Graphical Database Tool P. Martin and D. Tsichritzis Complete Logical Routings in Computer Mail Systems I also have the pleasure of announcing that Bruce Croft has joined the Editorial Board. Bob Allen ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Feb 86 23:12:13 EST From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf Ed, Here is a review I wrote of Chris's book. Its supposed to appear in JASIS as some point. I've sent the NROFF source. Thought it might be nice to put it in IR digest. -- Thanks -- Bill Frakes .P \fBInformation and Misinformation: An Investigation of the Notions of Information, Misinformation, Informing, and Misinforming.\fR Fox, Christopher John. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press; 1983: 223 pp. .P The concept of information is among the most important of our time, yet its meaning is unclear. What is this mysterious thing called information which we use to label systems, mental processes, and even the current age of civilization? This is the thorny and longstanding question that Fox examines. The answer the he reaches has interesting implications for the information sciences, both on a theoretical and a practical level. .P Fox's basic premise is that an adequate definition of information must encompass the various common uses of the term. He reviews previous definitions of information, which have ranged from Fairthorne's view that information is a bogus concept akin to phlogiston, to precise definitions in a narrow domain such as Shannon's. Using the technique of analytic philosophy, Fox argues that none of these definitions captures the meaning of information as we use it in ordinary speech. .P The author argues persuasively that a definition which does capture our ordinary use of "information" is that information is propositions, i.e. descriptive statements about the world. This result strongly indicates that the voluminous research that has been done in philosophy, mathematics, and other fields, on the nature and expression of propositions has direct relevance to the foundations of computer and information science. Fox's results also have practical consequences for the ways information should be represented and manipulated in systems. .P If information is propositions, then an adequate formalism for expressing information in a way useful for computation will most likely be one allowing the expression and manipulation of propositions. This is not the case with current information retrieval systems which are term based. For example, the logical statements and production rules used in used in expert systems should be more useful for representing the information in a document than a listing of the terms in a document. As an illustration of this, consider a document consisting of the sentence, "John loves Mary". In an information retrieval system, whether boolean or probabalistic, the information will be represented by the words, "John", "loves", and "Mary" losing the semantic links between the words. The same document could be represented in a logical language, such as PROLOG, as "loves(John,Mary)" with no such semantic loss. .P This book is an important addition to the literature of the information sciences. The author does a good job of explaining the methodology he uses, and thus this book can and should be read by anyone interested in the foundations of the information sciences, information systems, or artificial intelligence. .DS William B. Frakes AT&T Bell Laboratories Holmdel, N.J. 07733 .DE ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1986 12:13 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [extract - Ed] Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 20 Feb 86 00:20 EST Subject: CCA Colloquium Thursday, 20 February 10:00am Room: 4th floor large conference room, Four Cambridge Center CCA Colloquium Series Deductive Databases and a Relational Knowledge Base A Survey of Work at ICOT, Japan Haruo Yokota and Masaki Murakami (Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT--Japan) ) - - - CCA (Computer Corporation of America) is located at Four Cambridge Center, which is on Broadway, behind Legal Seafood. Tell the security desk you are visiting CCA and they will send you up to CCA on the 5th floor. Tell CCA's receptionist to call Barbara Wong who will show you where the seminar is. (If you can't remember that, simply say you're here for the colloquium.) - - - Abstracts of works to be covered: 1. Deductive Database System based on Unit Resolution by Haruo Yokota, Ko Sakai, Hidenori Itoh This paper presents a methodology for constructing a deductive database system consisting of an intensional processor and a relational database management system. A setting evaluation is introduced. The intensional processor derives a setting from the intensional database and a given goal and sends the setting and the relationship between setting elements to the management system. The management system performs a unit resolution with setting using relational operations for the extensional databases. An extended least fixed point operation is introduced to terninate all types of recursive queries. 2. A Model and an Architecture for a Relational Knowledge Base by Hauro Yokota, Hidenori Itoh A relational knowledge base model and an architecture which manipulates the model are presented. An item stored in the relational knowledge base is a term, and it is retrieved by unification operation between the terms. The relational knowledge base architecture we propose consists of a number of unification engines, several disk systems, a control processor, and a multiport page-memory. The system has a knowledge compiler to support a variety of knowledge representations. 3. Formal Semantics of a Relational Knowledge Base by Masaki Murakami, Hauro Yokota, Hidenori Itoh A mathematical foundations for formal semantics of term relations [Yokota et al. 85] is presented. A term relation is a basic data structure of a relational knowledge base. It is an enhanced version of relational model in a database theory. It may include syntactically complex structures such as terms or literals containing variables as items of relations. The items are retrieved with operations called retrieval-by-unification. We introduce as a semantic domain of n-ary-term relations n_T_RELATIONS and define a partial order on them. We characterize retrieval-by-unification as operations on n_T_RELATIONS with monotone functions and greatest lower bounds. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************