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How Library Research Can Help You With Your EE 481 Research Report

Objectives of EE 481: Fuzzy Sets and Applications

The objectives of EE 481 include the following:

Objective 1	Understand how fuzzy sets model ambiguity
Objective 2	Manipulate fuzzy membership functions for simple operations
Objective 3	Understand and use fuzzy relations
Objective 4	Perform linguistic analysis using fuzzy sets
Objective 5	Develop and simulate simple fuzzy controllers
Objective 6	Discuss briefly other areas in which fuzzy sets may be applied
Objective 7	Perform basic literature searches and prepare short presentations

 

How The MSOE Library Can Help

The MSOE Library can help you with Objectives [6] and [7]. In order to fulfill these objectives, you are asked to write a research report that summarizes a fuzzy set application or applications which you will read about in one or two technical papers.

To locate a suitable paper or article, you should consider doing some basic library research. This tutorial will describe some basic library resources useful for locating materials. It will also provide you with information on how to use those resources.

What About Web Research?

These days, in our networked world, why not just use the Web for obtaining materials for class assignments? The Web is easy and fast, and you can usually find something. Why not just use it?

The answer to this question is that the Web can indeed be very useful in research, but that it is necessary to understand how to use it; it's also necessary to understand what is on the Web and -- more importantly -- what isn't on the Web. In order to do this, we need to understand a few basic things about the Web.

The "Internet Fallacy"

The "Internet Fallacy" is essentially the false belief that "everything's on the Web". The reality is much different:

• FACT: Everything is not on the Web.


• FACT: Information not available for free on the Web includes virtually all copyright-protected documents (e.g., journal articles, conference literature, most books).


• FACT: Information not on the Web includes the majority of everything ever published. One significant reason for this state-of-affairs is simply the fact that large-scale print-to-electronic conversion is labor-intensive and expensive.

Things To Be Aware of When Using the Web For Research

Copyright Law

• Copyright law protects the intellectual property and products of information producers, such as book publishers, magazine and journal publishers, and others. It is hardly in the interest of information producers to give this information away for free on the Web when they are in the business to make a profit from it. Generally speaking, then, they don't give it away. On the Web, you occasionally find protected material, but in reality, most protected material is not on the Web. Moreover, spurred by fears of how easy it is to disseminate materials over the Web, many publishers have successfully pushed for more strict amendments to the copyright law.


• To realize how important copyright law is in terms of the availability of materials on the Web, it may be useful to think of an analogous situation: Napster.

Web Noise

• There is no doubt that the Web contains a tremendous amount of information. Lower bound estimates suggest the Web features more than 320 million indexable pages containing over 15 billion words (and this does not include non-indexable sites).


• Some of these sites are very good and very useful. There are many sites which feature scholarly documents, research results, government publications, etc.


• Many academics -- in the interest of scholarly communication and cooperation -- often publish documents on the Web (assuming that they own the copyright for those documents).


• For example, click here to see a Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Evidence Sets and Contextual Genetic Algorithms: Exploring Uncertainty, Context, and Embodiment in Cognitive and Biological Systems." This is a 1997 Ph.D. dissertation in Systems Science by Luis M. Rocha, currently of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The dissertation employs fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. It is freely available on the Web because Dr. Rocha owns the copyright and because he wishes to make it available (presumably in the interests of scholarly communication).


• A lot more sites on the Web, however, are devoted to advertising and personal interests. One researcher, for example, examined 1,160 different cited Web pages which were retrieved in answer to 60 questions. Of these pages, 33% were either dead links or duplicate pages; only 14% provided complete and correct answers; 10% provided correct -- but incomplete -- answers; 8% gave incorrect information; and an astonishing 56% provided no information to answer the question at all (James H. Sweetland, Spring 2000, "Reviewing the World Wide Web -- Theory Versus Reality" Library Trends Vol. 48(4), pp. 748-768).

 

Inadequate Web Information Retrieval on the Web

 

• No single Web search engine covers more than 34% of the Web, with an average coverage of only 18%. By combining engines, coverage can be increased, but does not exceed 50% [Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, 3 April 1998, "Searching the World Wide Web" Science Vol. 280(5360), pp. 98-100; Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, January 1999, "Searching the Web: General and Scientific Information Access" IEEE Communications Vol. 37(1), pp. 116-122; Kurt D. Bollacker, Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, March/April 2000, "Discovering Relevant Scientific Literature on the Web" IEEE Intelligent Systems & Their Applications Vol. 15(2), pp. 42-47].


• Search engines do not index some content on the Web, including .pdf files and Web-accessed databases.


• Efforts are being made to improve search engine technology. These efforts are likely to result in searching costs for users.

 

Professional Publications

Consider the following citation analysis of two recent issues of the professional journal, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems:

Issue	Articles	Total References	References that Cite Web Sites
October 2000	15	414	1 (0.24%)
December 2000	16	356	1 (0.28%)
TOTALS	31	770	2 (0.25%)

The 31 articles in these two issues feature 770 references, only two (0.25%) of which are for Web resources. Most of the references cited are for books, journal literature, Ph.D. dissertations, conference literature, and technical resports.

Although the Web clearly has revolutionized research, in addition to facilitating communication, this citation analysis suggests that solid scholarly research still relies on traditional library resources.

The Best Strategy for Most Scholarly Research

• For scholarly, academic, or class-related research projects, a combination of library and Web resources usually produces the best results.
• The Web is easy and fast. Many times, there are things easily available on the Web that are not easily available elsewhere. Moreover, the Web is a revolutionary communications tool.
• However, you need to use the Web carefully. It's important to understand what's there and what isn't there. It's also important to ask yourself some questions about what you find on the Web, such as "Who wrote this page?", and "What is this person's academic credentials?". Finally, you still need to use reputable and refereed academic resources, most of which are traditional library resources (e.g., books, journal articles), even though your library may now enable you to access these things via the Web.