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Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Wiley Online Library : Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

  • Requirements and use of in-service information in an engineering redesign task: Case studies from the aerospace industry
    This article describes the research stimulated by a fundamental shift that is occurring in the manufacture and marketing of aero engines for commercial and defense purposes, away from the selling of products to the provision of services. This research was undertaken in an aerospace company, which designs and manufactures aero engines and also offers contracts, under which it remains responsible for the maintenance of engines. These contracts allow the company to collect far more data about the in-service performance of their engines than was previously available. This article aims at identifying what parts of this in-service information are required when components or systems of existing engines need to be redesigned because they have not performed as expected in service. In addition, this article aims at understanding how designers use this in-service information in a redesign task. In an attempt to address these aims, we analyzed five case studies involving redesign of components or systems of an existing engine. The findings show that the in-service information accessed by the designers mainly contains the undesired physical actions (e.g., deterioration mechanisms, deterioration effects, etc.) and the causal chains of these undesired physical actions. We identified a pattern in the designers' actions regarding the use of these causal chains. The designers have generated several solutions that utilize these causal chains seen in the in-service information. The findings provide a sound basis for developing tools and methods to support designers in effectively satisfying their in-service information requirements in a redesign task.

  • Power law distributions in information science: Making the case for logarithmic binning
    We suggest partial logarithmic binning as the method of choice for uncovering the nature of many distributions encountered in information science (IS). Logarithmic binning retrieves information and trends ?not visible? in noisy power law tails. We also argue that obtaining the exponent from logarithmically binned data using a simple least square method is in some cases warranted in addition to methods such as the maximum likelihood. We also show why often-used cumulative distributions can make it difficult to distinguish noise from genuine features and to obtain an accurate power law exponent of the underlying distribution. The treatment is nontechnical, aimed at IS researchers with little or no background in mathematics.

  • Adapting semantic natural language processing technology to address information overload in influenza epidemic management
    The explosion of disaster health information results in information overload among response professionals. The objective of this project was to determine the feasibility of applying semantic natural language processing (NLP) technology to addressing this overload. The project characterizes concepts and relationships commonly used in disaster health-related documents on influenza pandemics, as the basis for adapting an existing semantic summarizer to the domain. Methods include human review and semantic NLP analysis of a set of relevant documents. This is followed by a pilot test in which two information specialists use the adapted application for a realistic information-seeking task. According to the results, the ontology of influenza epidemics management can be described via a manageable number of semantic relationships that involve concepts from a limited number of semantic types. Test users demonstrate several ways to engage with the application to obtain useful information. This suggests that existing semantic NLP algorithms can be adapted to support information summarization and visualization in influenza epidemics and other disaster health areas. However, additional research is needed in the areas of terminology development (as many relevant relationships and terms are not part of existing standardized vocabularies), NLP, and user interface design.

  • Influences of users' familiarity with visual search topics on interactive video digital libraries
    User-centered analysis can benefit the development of interactive video digital libraries. Findings from this study support the idea that having additional understanding about the intended users of video digital libraries can help researchers match system designs with the envisioned use of prototype systems. This study examines one user-centered factor specifically, familiarity with visual search topics, to explore if and how this may be associated with other factors within an interactive video retrieval context. Twenty-eight users from the field of science education were recruited to complete six visual search topics using a prototype system to retrieve video clips from a collection of NASA Science Education Programs. Analysis revealed that topic familiarity was associated with other factors that were examined throughout this study, including user-assessed and experimenter-assessed topic completion ratios, opinions of the prototype system, and interaction behaviors. Such results can have a variety of implications for developing video digital libraries, especially those designed to support queries and interactions of knowledgeable users from a defined domain.

  • Big macs and Eigenfactor scores: The correlation conundrum



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