theorywatch

Well, based solely on the results of my query on “What is null relevance?”, the Answer Man (the mighty artificial intelligence ultimately destined to replace reference librarians) won’t be emerging from PowerSet, the natural language search engine described in this Slate article, any time soon. On the other hand, standard reference search skills did help me in finding a highly relevant article on the topic by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh at Berkeley.

July 10 Update: however, my CI skills must be a little rusty, as I missed the announcement that Microsoft is acquiring PowerSet. It is devoutly to be wished that Microsoft does not in fact develop the Answer Man as its Google-killer. (Yes, librarians are currently a bit miffed with Google, but that’s another story….)

Oh, here’s another thing (bad pun intended) at least weakly relevant to this whole question of the “Answer Man”: Tim Spalding’s post from the ALA session this past Sunday on the Future of Cataloging….

relevance