October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5

Cyberspace
Avenues for Information

By Mohan Sodhi

"Alas! Alas! Small things overcome great ones, the Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice."

These are the mysterious words uttered by Dom Claude in Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" as he looks sadly from a printed book to the cathedral of Notre Dame. The narrator himself provides the interpretation: "Printing will kill architecture" as a "book is soon made, costs but little, and can go so far."

Now substitute "printing" with "Internet" (or "multimedia"), and "architecture" with "printing," and the quote may still hold true. As books made information accessible to more people than was possible with stone edifices, so it is with the Internet. But there is also more junk: anyone with an opinion can make it known through their Web page or by flooding an e-mail list.


Seeking information
So, how do we seek relevant information? Following is a guide on how to think about seeking information in cyberspace:

(1) Seeking help from people

From one person: Find e-mail addresses of people who could help or direct you.

From many: You can use e-mail lists that are devoted to special topics.
Typically, these lists let you post queries only if you are a subscriber. To access the list of OR/MS-related list servers by e-mail, send the message "get emaillst.txt" to POL-request@silmaril.smeal.psu.edu. By sending the e-mail message "help" to the same address, you will receive subscription information.

From a lot of people: This is where news groups come in handy. For instance, by its first anniversary, the Usenet news group sci.op-research had 17,000 readers worldwide. Given this large pool of readers, it is likely you will get a reply to even highly specialized queries.

(2) Newsletters, informed opinions, and newspapers

Edited newsletters: I have found that an electronic newsletter delivered by e-mail can be immensely useful for keeping track of specialized information when it has a good editor. An excellent example was the Computists Communique by Kenneth Laws (laws@ai.sri.com), which is now available on the Web. To my knowledge, there is currently no e-mail-based newsletter for OR practitioners, but it is a topic INFORMS could address.

Custom news services: There are many news services now that will track information of potential interest to you, and provide it to you via e-mail or the Web. For instance, IBM's InfoSage (http://www.infosage.ibm.com) will deliver articles twice a day based on your selection from among more than 2,200 topics.

Newspapers: Many U.S. and British newspapers provide summaries/advertisements on the Web. For instance, for international news you can check out the sites for the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com) and the Financial Times (http://www.FT.com). OR/MS Today also has a Web site (http://207.69.204.147/ORMS.shtml). And finally, there exists a "newspaper" which is only published electronically &emdash; the ClariNet family of more than 500 news groups.

(3) Documents, programs and other information

The Web: The Internet has become popular mostly because of the Web. Indeed, a wealth of information exists on the World Wide Web, but it needs to be sorted and searched in addition to having its value and reliability assessed. You can find information on the Web in a variety of ways:

(a) sites that enable you to search for information on the Web, such as Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com), Excite (http://www.excite.com), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), InfoSeek (http://guide.infoseek.com) and Open Text (http://www.opentext.com:8080). There are even tools such as Web Compass from Quarterdeck that search the results returned by these search engines.
(b) Directory services for browsing, such as Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) and The Whole Internet Catalog (http://nearnet.gnn.com/wic).
(c) Specialized directories, an example of which is the Virtual OR/MS Library (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~msodhi) for OR/MS.
(d) Web pages of companies, individuals and organizations. INFORMS Online (http://www.informs.org) caters to INFORMS members by providing membership directory information and abstracts of talks from INFORMS Conferences. Another site is POL-Web (http://silmaril.smeal.psu.edu/pol.html), which is targeted at OR practitioners.

Online services: CompuServe, America Online and other online services also provide general information. Among these, from all reviews I have seen so far, CompuServe is considered to be the most comprehensive source of information. Specialized services such as Dow Jones and Lexis-Nexis exist for those who can afford them.

Conclusion
As you can see, relying on e-mail, news groups, the Web and online services will likely get you the information you want. To be sure, there are issues of cost &emdash; some of the services may cost anywhere from $20 per month to $200 per month &emdash; and efficiency. Depending on the query, you will have to decide whether waiting for a reply from a news group is better than wading through 200 Web sites returned from a search engine. And finally, there is the issue of the appropriateness of the source, as everything &emdash; Notre Dame, the book and cyberspace &emdash; has its place in this best of all worlds.


Dr. ManMohan (Mohan) S. Sodhi is Senior Consultant at Sabre Decision Technologies (SDT). He is the founder of the OR news group, sci.op-research, and helped design and create INFORMS Online. He can be reached at Mohan_Sodhi@SDT.com and, at least for now, at MohanSodhi@AOL.com. He welcomes feedback.