Workshop Report on a Future Information Infrastructure for the Physical Sciences. The Facts of the Matter: Finding, Understanding, and Using Information about out Physical World Held at the National Academy of Sciences on May 30-31, 2000.

摘要

Forty years ago it took days,weeks or even months for information regarding an interesting discovery to be communicated to the relevant community of scientists and engineers. At that time,most of us kept a collection of postcards that we used to request reprints of articles as they appeared in the journals we read. This was the situation at the time that Ted Maiman reported his results using ruby as a medium to make a laser. Some twenty years later, this time interval was shortened to days by fax machines when Muller and Bednorz revealed their experiments demonstrating high temperature superconductivity. Today, with the Internet, that interval has shrunk to seconds, minutes, at most, hours. I suspect that some astronomical observations are announced within seconds of the time it takes to type a note and launch it on the Internet to a few tens or hundreds of one's closest colleagues. This situation makes it imperative to have a system in place that allows the rapid communication of information of value to scientists and engineers who are engaged in what has become an intensely competitive research environment. This Workshop seeks to cast light on the problem of communication and dissemination of information within the physical sciences community,and to make practical suggestions regarding steps that can be taken to improve the situation.