Engineering approach

It is assumed that human needs and uses of information can best be accommodated by successive development and testing of ingenious systems and devices to improve information retrieval and services. The fundamental test of validity for the engineering approach is an operational one, namely, "Does it work?" Thus a major method of developing new knowledge in engineering is through "proof of concept" work, in which an experimental system or device is developed and tested, improved, tested some more, and so on. For theory of engineering, see Dablbom, Beckman, & Nilsson (2002) and Simon (1981). For applications in LIS, see Croft & Thompson (1987), Hendry & Harper (1997), Kraft & Petry (1997), Over (2001), and Salton & McGill (1983). Variations on this approach are found in artificial intelligence (Minsky, 1968; Russell & Norvig, 1995) and natural language processing (Allen, 1995; Chowdury, 2003; Liddy et al., 1993).

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