A novel method and device for creation and management of data and information in electronic networks.

摘要

This research is an effort to understand the special needs of business managers who are increasingly expected to use computers and information technology in their business strategy and execution, but have little or no background in computers. The work is especially geared to understanding how the needs of such business managers are converted into a Requirements Specification Document by the Requirements Engineers, from which the information technology systems and solutions are designed.; It is generally hard to determine the real needs of the business managers due to a myriad of issues, the most important of which is the presence of ambiguity, uncertainty, and the ability of managers to routinely harbor contradictions in their decision-making process till they have to be resolved either way. Further, the perspective of the manager, and their assimilation of data and information depends upon whether they are decomposing a system to understand it (top-down) or building the system up from its pieces (bottom-up). As the decision making process is itself complex, the tools that are desirable for the managers are those that are simple (not simplistic) and ideally they should be almost transparent to the managers.; We have developed a machine that can help the managers deal with structured and unstructured data and add structure to unstructured data by an iterative process, and the machine is called the Sharma-Winchester (S-W) Machine. To validate the machine, we developed various versions of the S-W Computer based on the Machine, but due to the confoundedness of the data, tool, and users, could not draw quantitative conclusions about the effectiveness of the Machine. The S-W Machine is based on the Graphical User Interface in preference to the Character User Interfaces, uses standard folders and files (esp. archives like zip files that can save the path information about the files), and is based on a hierarchical storage design. We have shown how to implement the core elements of the machine, i.e., the input, output, and storage, but were unable to quantitatively test it because it was impossible to isolate just the design of the machine from its implementation as a S-W Computer during the case studies in which we tried to validate the device. But we believe that the machine is based on sound principles, and would be an effective contribution to the tools that are available for the managers to enhance their data and information related performance.