Tau.Neutrino said:
With so many new discoveries in science there appears to be a growing fragmented information problem.
Keeping that information structured is an on going problem, I think some scientists get too caught up in research and fail to step back to see the bigger picture.
I think its the task of various science organizations to do this, even who ever looks after world standards ?
Anyone else think there’s a fragmented information problem.
Before web searches and Wikipedia the fragmentation of information was a huge growing problem. The only way around it back then was to personally search a Uni library for books and then find all the papers that referenced those books using the hardcopy of the Science Citation Index. Order in the papers if they weren’t in the Uni library and keep going.
Even then, after a process taking at least three weeks, I’d still only get about a 50% hit rate on information.
After web searches appeared, the two main problems were that the searched information was always out of date, and no paper older than about five years could be found that way.
Both those problems have now been overcome. The three limitations now are that of cost – because you can never be sure how useful a paper or book is until you buy access, old stuff that has not (yet) been digitised. And private publications such as technical reports and conference proceedings that don’t get digitised either.
I had a really hard time tracking down a book that was published only last year, i had to call in external help, because the author paid for publication. And because being an Australian book it doesn’t show up on any bookseller’s website.
Information fragmentation is much much less of a problem than it used to be. But unless someone puts up the money to put it on the web it doesn’t exist.
And there’s almost as much difficulty now with foreign language publications as there used to be. Luckily, the only languages I’ve needed to extract information from have been Russian, German, Japanese and French (successfully) and Chinese (unsuccessfully).
I don’t count Facebook and Twitter as “information”. Too fragmented. The fragmentation of Wikipedia is a pain – too many dead links, and whenever I really need a link, it’s missing. But it’s still bloody marvelous.
