Talk:Gerard Salton Award

I must weep red-eyed daily because all the honorees and SIGIR in contrast to SIGWEB are still red-linked in Wikipedia. The late SMART director and dictator Gerard Salton should self-defeat Gerald Salton here and now.

The article information retrieval (IR) looks like The Waste Land disillusioned with the Holy Grail after all. Where are IR professionals? What has become of them? Are they too busy or too lazy to be informed of the state of affairs? Do they feel like being frustrated or castrated by vandalism or the like?

What if they should not be determined to defend the wide IR territory but their own narrow paradigms or academic partisanship such as automatic and statistic indexing and searching, self-defeatingly raging something like a religious war against the other IR paradigms such as hypertext.

In 1970, IBM was running INTIME (INteractive Textual Information Management Experiment) to examine the feasibility of integrating online text editing, storage, retrieval, and typesetting functions. The project leader Charles Goldfarb later known as the father of SGML, hence the grandfather of HTML, claims that the GML prior to SGML emerged as a result. He further claims:


 * "Unlike ... other pioneers in this area, my chief motivation was information retrieval, not typesetting. (Remember, I was trying to automate a law office.)" -- Charles Goldfarb (1997) SGML: The Reason Why and the First Published Hint, JASIS, v.48, n.7.

In 1980, Berners-Lee designed the ENQUIRE hypertext system for personal use. Refer to the phrase "storage and retrieval" in the ENQUIRE documentation.

In 1990, he initiated the WWW HyperText Project at the CERN Documentation Center, allegedly mainly based on ENQUIRE. This project is strikingly analogous to IBM's INTIME, whose influence is thought unlikely though likely Goldfarb may suggest it is.

What looks quite strange here, as compared with Goldfarb, is that he later seemed to avoid mentioning information retrieval in relation to the Web development. Nonetheless, the utilitarian user-centered design of the Web should be credited as the greatest IR achievement and the greatest happiness that the world population has seldom enjoyed. Why then couldn't, shouldn't or wouldn't all IR community take pride?

But it sounds like a taboo! Therefore, keep silent to be blessed in one way even if cursed in another. Or, keep eloquent to be blessed anyway.

In 1997, when Charles Goldfarb hinted in ASIST as above, Tefko Saracevic eloquently delivered the ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award acceptance address, "Users lost (summary): reflections on the past, future, and limits of information science." He said, "Whose relevance? Users!"

As a matter of fact as mentioned briefly as above, there has been user-centrism one way or another such as INTIME in 1970, ENQUIRE in 1980, WWW in 1990, and so forth. Why was Saracevic so eloquent then?


 * "I am afraid that the greatest danger that information science faces is losing the sight of users. [...] But, I am also convinced that the greatest pay-off for information science will come if and when it successfully integrates systems and users research. Society needs such a science."

I do not know why SIGIR and SIGWEB should be so isolated from each other. The American computer marketers may well be suspected of conspiracy for such isolation, not to mention the anomalous split of knowledge between LIS and CIS (computer and information science). Information science may be destined to begin with the library and end with the computer.

All this anomalous state of knowledge makes me weep daily more and more bitterly. --KYPark 16:44, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)