This special topic looks at an interesting (and early) knowledge discovery effort in medicine. Swanson's research demonstrated the potential of uncovering knowledge from bibliographic connections, including the discovery of connections between fish oil and Raynaud's syndrome, as well as migraines and magnesium. The main insight is that a lot of knowledge is created in silos. The organization of science into specialties makes it much easier to categorize and navigate the underlying literature, but many of the interconnections may go unnoticed. There are a huge number of potential interconnections or combinations, which are not easily dealt with in conventional categorizations. How do we explore this immense network of logical relationships? As Swanson notes in the abstract to the paper: "Individual units of literature are created to some degree independently of one another, and, insofar as that is so, the logical connections among the units, though inevitable, may be unintended by and even unknown to their creators. Until those fragments, like scattered pieces of a puzzle, are brought together, the relationships among them may remain undiscovered – even though the isolated pieces might long have been public knowledge." This healthcare application sets the stage nicely for later modules on data warehousing and data mining. However, it is distinctly low tech in nature.The examples pursued by Swanson were developed through queries of online literature resources. These handcrafted literature queries echo the SQL query writing that we are currently studying in the course. So, it seems worthwhile examining the potential of using queries to make connections in large data collections.
For your first post, summarize the reading and add your thoughts. Feel free to include external sources, experiences from your work, etc. into the discussion
Questions
- Swanson_JASIS1987TwoLiteratures.pdfDownload Swanson_JASIS1987TwoLiteratures.pdfD.R. Swanson and N.R. Smallheiser, "An Interactive System for Finding Complementary Literatures: A Stimulus to Scientific Discovery, Artificial Intelligence, 91: 183-203,
- Swanson_AI1997System.pdfDownload Swanson_AI1997System.pdfM. Weeber et al., "Using Concepts in Literature-Based Discovery: Simulating Swanson's Raynaud-Fish Oil and Migraine-Magnesium Discoveries, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 52(7): 548-557,
- Weeber_JASIS2001FishOilSimulation.pdfDownload Weeber_JASIS2001FishOilSimulation.pdf
One primary post (minimum 300 words) .