PROGRAMMES IN ADVANCED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/eb026741
Date01 February 1983
Published date01 February 1983
Pages85-87
AuthorKAREN SPARCK JONES
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management,Library & information science
DOCUMENTATION NOTE
PROGRAMMES IN ADVANCED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
KAREN SPARCK JONES
Computer
Laboratory,
University
of Cambridge
MAJOR INITIATIVES in advanced information technology are under way or
have been proposed in the UK, Europe and Japan. 'Information technology' is an
umbrella expression with different interpretations: it has been adopted in these
policy contexts to refer to all areas of computer (and communications) tech-
nology, including hardware and software and both to computing in itself and
to the applications of computers; it refers in the broadest sense to the technology
of and for information processing.
The information processing possibilities of computers are familiar to documen-
talists, information scientists and librarians. Clearly, R & D in information tech-
nology as a whole has broad relevance to documentation (I here use 'documen-
tation' in turn as an umbrella for documentation, information and library work),
and should therefore be monitored by the documentation community
as
a matter
of general interest. However the various initiatives share common elements of
more direct relevance to documentation.
This note has two purposes:
(1) to provide
a
brief summary of the various initiatives, with an indication of
features of special relevance to documentation;
(2) to comment on the overall importance of these initiatives, taken together,
for documentation.
1.
INITIATIVES TAKEN
(a) Historically, the stimulus for several of the initiatives came from the rapid
development of information technology in Japan and particularly from the
Japanese proposals for Fifth Generation Computer Systems.1 Special emphasis was
placed in the latter on novel programming languages based on logic and allowing
a declarative
as
opposed to procedural approach to programming, associated with
parallel as opposed to serial hardware designed to execute several alternative
operations simultaneously. Computing support of this kind is regarded as essen-
tial for the type of computer application systems to be built in the next decade:
these systems fall within the broad area of applied artificial intelligence involving
the manipulation of very large amounts of knowledge in complex inferential pro-
blem solving. The Fifth Generation project has identified a number of target areas
for R & D including work on the 'infrastructure' requirements for building and
maintaining sophisticated application systems, work on all aspects of knowledge
representation and inferential problem solving required for such systems, as well
as on intelligent interfaces to them, and work on so-called 'basic application
systems' for machine translation, question answering and speech and image
understanding. Particular application systems may then be built; e.g., for specific
Journal
of
Documentation,
Vol. 39, No.
2,
June 1983, pp. 85-87.
85

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