University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

LOOK: Implementation of an Expert System in Information Retrieval for Database Selection

Thornburg, Gail Ellen

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Description

Title
LOOK: Implementation of an Expert System in Information Retrieval for Database Selection
Author(s)
Thornburg, Gail Ellen
Issue Date
1987
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
  • Smith, Linda C.
  • Michalski, R.S.
Department of Study
Library Science
Discipline
Library Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Information Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
  • This project was designed to construct an advisory or expert system in one area of online information retrieval, specifically, choice of online database. Problems of this domain include proliferation of potentially expensive databases, and the difficulty of predicting the specific database(s) most likely to yield optimum results in the climate of extreme "information compartmentalization." This implementation made use of an integrated set of software tools developed in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The system was designed to reflect as closely as possible the decision-making expertise of academic online searchers in life sciences.
  • The implemented system, LOOK (non-acronymic), represented general features of 18 online databases, and its advice succeeded in satisfying the experts involved in its development. The system used a rule-based representation, and advisory sessions were guided by an inference algorithm featuring three phases of evaluation. Issues discussed here include the numbers of variables and values required to represent the domain with any adequacy, the levels of abstraction apparent in these variables, and the difficulty of separating domain from world knowledge in constructing an apt representation.
Graduation Semester
1987
Type of Resource
text
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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/69498

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Information Sciences
Dissertations and theses from the School of Information Sciences