December 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 6

Avenues for Information: A Case Study

By Mohan Sodhi

"Open sesame!"

No, that is not how you open doors to information in cyberspace regardless of what you read about the Internet, or what presidential candidates may imply. In my previous article, I presented a guide for seeking information in cyberspace:

Seeking help from people, using e-mail, e-mail list servers, and news groups
Getting regular information or searching electronic newsletters, informed opinions, and newspapers
Searching documents, programs and other information primarily on the Web and online services

I will now describe my own experience searching for information on a programming paradigm called "constraint programming," not to be confused with the drum, tambourine and rope trick of the "theory of constraints." My employer had arranged a tutorial on constraint programming software produced by a software vendor (ILOG) to introduce me to the concepts and to the software. Subsequently, I attended a conference in Paris where I learned about applications using the vendor's software. But as I am moving towards implementation, I need more information rather than relying solely on the vendor.

I recalled two things:

I had seen references to a news group, comp.constraints, in some postings on the OR news group, sci.op-research, and
when I used to post a list of "frequently asked questions" (FAQ) on sci.op-research, Michael Jampel had requested me to list comp.constraints as well in the list of news groups.

So this was my starting point.

Seeking help from people
E-mail: I e-mailed a brief message to Jempel describing my situation and requesting information on ILOG and constraint programming. His reply was quite useful; he gave me information about the company and provided the name of a contact.

E-mail list servers:
(a)		Looking up the list of e-mail list servers (you can do this by sending the e-mail message "get emaillst.txt" to POL-request@silmaril.smeal.psu.edu), I found a list, "CSP, Techniques of Constraint Satisfaction," with the address listserver@saturne.cert.fr. To find out if this list was still alive, I sent the message "help" to get a list of commands, then the message "lists" to find out which lists were supported, and finally, "stat csp-list" to get the list of non-concealed members and the number of their postings, which turned out to be mostly zero. Thus, within a few minutes I was able to infer that although the list still existed, it was likely quite dormant and possibly a blind alley.
(b)		From the "Constraints Archives" (see Web and Online Services below), I obtained names of other mailing lists, including SCHED-L and IDSS, but I have not explored these yet.
(c)		From ILOG, I found that they will create a mailing list as a sort of support group, where their customers can pose questions to each other.

News groups: I had heard about comp.constraints and ILOG first in sci.op-research. Now I turned my attention to comp.constraints and looked up messages posted on the news group comp.constraints using Netscape at work and America Online at home so I would learn more about the news group before posting any query. One of the messages was a highly informative list of FAQs and its availability on the Web.

Electronic newsletters
I did not learn about any electronic newsletter, although I did see a reference to a new, presumably hard-copy journal, Constraints, published by Kluwer Publishers.

Web and online services
ILOG's Web site: I found the vendor's Web site by trying the addressing convention http://www.<name-of-company>.com for companies, hence http://www.ilog.com, and was able to download some informational/advertising documents, although the download failed on one document.

Archives/FAQ of comp.constraints: In the FAQ of the news group, I found the address of the "Constraints Archive" ( http://www.cirl.uoregon.edu) maintained by David Joslin, and that of "CCC-Constraints Archive" ( http://www.cs.unh.edu/ccc/archive/) maintained by Peggy Eaton. These archives were quite valuable in providing me with a "who's who" list, bibliography and archived papers.

Results from Search Engines: Hitting the "Net Search" button in Netscape brought me to InfoSeek ( http://guide.infoseek.com) along with pointers to other search engines like Lycos. I entered the word "constraint" and to my pleasant surprise, the first 20 documents returned by Infoseek appeared pertinent to constraint-programming. On the other hand, what would have been the most useful sites for my purpose, Constraints Archive and CCC-Constraints Archive, were not included in the top 30. America Online's keyword search for "constraints" did not yield anything useful, not even a reference to comp.constraints.

Conclusion
In my previous article, I had listed these search criteria: cost, efficiency and appropriateness of the source. Asking people for help directly and reading posted messages was, in my case, certainly more fruitful than simply pressing a button to search over the Web even though the information is there. So, although cyberspace has tremendous potential for storing and distributing information, information search and retrieval is not a "press-the-button" technology. You have to learn how to use resources effectively as outlined in this and the previous column.

Dr. ManMohan 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 MohanSodhi@AOL.com. He welcomes feedback.

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