New Software Programs Can Manage A Scientist's Two Lives

Over the years, microcomputers have proved to be a great help to scientists, who are, in a sense, in the information business, and need all the automated help they can get in managing their research data. But scientists often lead busy private lives as well, and therefore can benefit greatly from a system that supports the efficient management of personal as well as professional information. During the past year, the computer press has identified a class of IBM PC-family software intended for this purpose and has given this genre the label PIM (for Personal Information Manager). The category is a broad one, to be sure, since it comprises a wide variety of tools, ranging from telephone directories and programs that allow the collection of random jottings to what I’ll call the “hard-core” PIMs, which can be compared to scientific notebooks. Require Serious Investment Here I’ll review the current main entries in this product category: Agenda, askSam, Grandview, Info-XL, and IZE. All of these programs require serious investment—not only in dollars (they range in price from $295 to $445) but also in the time required to learn to use them and to enter the information to be organized and retrieved. (In this regard, some of these programs have excellent import facilities, and some don’t. If you have the results of a large number of on-line literature searches, for example, a program like IZE will help absorb them easily without the need for reentry—and that’s a big plus.) All the programs use some combination of database and outline in addition to allowing free-form text entry. It is this combination that makes them different from the more traditional kinds of computer program. Agenda is built around two elements: items, which are fragments of text, and categories, which are bins into which you assign the items, with multiple assignments allowed for a single item. In addition, you can attach a large “note” to an item. The categories themselves are in the form of an outline. For example, you could use journal article titles as items, contents summaries as attached notes, and journal names and subjects as separate branches of a tree of categories. What makes Agenda so powerful is that you can formulate and save differing views of your basic data. Noteworthy in Agenda is its attempts to categorize an item automatically; example, if “bacteria” is a category and that word appears in the item text, the item is automatically assigned to that category. Its date recognition capability is also estimable; it understands, for example, the meaning of “a week from next Tuesday.” " AskSam (the name is an acronym for “Access Stored Knowledge via Symbolic Access Method”) is a rather elaborate textual database with considerable power, and also a considerable learning curve. Records are basically single screens of text, but you can add more structure if you wish. You cart devise fields that are specific to the record or to a subset of records. Because you can define templates, askSam is ideal for setting up something like a bibliographic database, in which you’d want a record structure for books that is different from the one for journal articles. For a true bibliographic database, you would want to use a special off-the-shelf program. Yet, as is almost always true of software programs, there’s a trade-off: ask-Sam, with its powerful search capability and structured language, will give you more flexibility in data manipulation than you get in dedicated bibliographic programs, but you’ll have to learn the tools and set them in place. " I’ve written before about Grandview (see The Scientist, May 30, 1988, page 25). I’ve used this program not only to prepare lectures and talks but also to schedule meetings. Recently, in connection with my participation in the organizing committee of an international conference. I got a list via electronic mail of speakers organized by subject, which I was asked to rank I imported it into Grandview, used its “prioritize” command to try rearrangements of each grouping, and exported it back to E-mail. Grandview also has a category featare that is simpler than, but related to, the one in Agenda; this makes it more than a “mere outliner. I found Info-XL the most intriguing of the products reviewed here. This program is not as complete as some of the other packages, but I liked its basic idea and found it very functional, even with missing feahires. It starts with an outline but allows you to assign a note to each outline entry. What makes it unique is the ability to assign a database entry to each item also. In addition, you can have multiple record formats, with different formats applied to different outline entries. These three parts—outline, notes, and databases—appear in separate windows (together with a calendar, daily schedule, and search Window). As you browse the outline, the other windows adjust to display the relevant information. The searches include fuzzy searching, in which a search for “katheter” would yield “catheter.” On the downside, the program cries out for mouse support, which is missing; there is no on-line help; the database is missing things like filters; the outliner is missing many of the features in the best stand-alone outline organizers; and the program’s import facilities are limited. Still, with the right kind of data, Info-XL could be valuable. .. IZE (as in conceptualiZE or pasteuriZE) is very different from the other programs discussed. Its basic elements are chunks of text, called “texts,” with assigned keywords. These texts can either be part of an IZE textbase or in external files associated with programs that IZE understands. When you request a search of keywords with Boolean links, IZE collects all the matches and presents them to you in an outline form. By default, it will attempt to set up the structure of the outline in terms of frequency of keywords in matching texts, but you can tell it to use “guidelines” to impose some more logical structure. Assigning keywords can be tedious, but there are tools for doing so automatically. For example, if you have lots of files of abstracts with keywords included, you could get IZE to import these abstracts and assign the right keywords. If you have large amounts of data, these programs can be very useful. Which program is best depends very much on the structure of the information that you need to organize. Barry Simon is IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech.

New Software Programs Can Manage A Scientist's Two Lives

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