Appendix 1: information management and evaluation.(biomimetic information management )

Information Management and Evaluation Systems--an example

The words that people use in communication are ill suited to standard word-based search engines. Frequently, new uses are invented for old words, ambiguous terms are used (the word "strike," for example, has more than 80 definitions), and multiple words are used to refer to the same idea. People also constantly categorize, but these categories are unstable both from individual to individual and from time to time, depending on the user's needs and interests. In short, human language is fuzzy and it requires fuzzy tools to deal with its meaning.

The problem is that most knowledge management tools are based not on how people use words, but on a symbolic approach to documents, where each word in a document is a symbol with a discrete and specific meaning. As a result, document retrieval systems that depend on the presence of exact words fail to retrieve relevant documents.

Biomimetic information management systems provide those fuzzy tools by using neural networks and other soft-computing techniques that emulate the way biological brains work. These systems also are self-organizing and do not require the laborious construction of rigid, expensive, prestructured rule bases. The result is an ad hoc categorization system that adapts itself to the intelligence problem at hand. The technology learns the meanings of words from ...