Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bionet!apple!rutgers!ukma!husc6!yale!briscoe-duke
From: briscoe-duke@CS.Yale.EDU (Duke Briscoe)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix
Subject: re: electronic journals, use of AI
Message-ID: <62277@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jun 89 22:02:53 GMT
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Reply-To: briscoe-duke@CS.Yale.EDU (Duke Briscoe)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT  06520-2158
Lines: 26

This is a follow-up message to my own message yesterday.

Using hypertext to link related material together is similar to
the way in which semantic nets or knowledge bases are built for
use by expert systems.  A problem in developing expert systems
has been that the knowledge and inference rules have to be
specified in excruciating detail in order for a computer to be
able to reliably use them.  My view of the utility of hypertext
is that the body of knowledge would gradually become interlinked
with references, and that people could navigate through that
hypertext medium, acting as much more flexible and capable
inference engines than any AI systems currently conceived.  The
body of knowledge could evolve, with knowledge added and also
with some ideas being pushed further into the background if they
do not prove useful.  The use of networks and a distributed
hypertext medium could allow ideas to widely propagate within a
matter of hours, instead of a matter of months as is typical now.
Also the medium could serve as a more global indexing of
information.  As my previous message stated, the hypertext medium
could have active components, so that in areas of knowledge where
there was greater automation, a researcher could call on the
available programs as part of the process of navigating the
hypertext.

I hope this clarifies some aspects of my perhaps overly verbose
message yesterday.