Other developments are less spectacular. There's a steady improvement in the performance of systems that can decide whether an ambiguous word such as "bat" means "flying mammal" or "sports tool" or "to hit"; there is solid work on cross-language information retrieval (which you will soon see in being able to find Chinese and French documents on the Web even though you type in English-only queries), and there is some rather rapid development of systems that answer simple questions automatically (rather like the popular web system AskJeeves, but this time done by computers, not humans). These systems refer to a large collection of text to find "factiods" (not opinions or causes or chains of events) in response to questions such as "what is the capital of Uganda?" or "how old is President Clinton?" or "who invented the xerox process?", and they do so rather better than I had expected.
= What do you think about e-books?
E-books, to me, are a non-starter. More even that seeing a concert live or a film at a cinema, I like the physical experience holding a book in my lap and enjoying its smell and feel and heft. Concerts on TV, films on TV, and e-books lose some of the experience; and with books particularly it is a loss I do not want to accept. After all, it's much easier and cheaper to get a book in my own purview than a concert or cinema. So I wish the e-book makers well, but I am happy with paper. And I don't think I will end up in the minority anytime soon — I am much less afraid of books vanishing than I once was of cinemas vanishing.
= What is your definition of cyberspace?
I define cyberspace as the totality of information that we can access via the Internet and computer systems in general. It is not, of course, a space, and it has interesting differences with libraries. For example, soon my fridge, my car, and I myself will be "known" to cyberspace, and anyone with the appropriate access permission (and interest) will be able to find out what exactly I have in my fridge and how fast my car is going (and how long before it needs new shock absorbers) and what I am looking at now. In fact, I expect that advertisements will change their language and perhaps even pictures and layout to suit my knowledge and tastes as I walk by, simply by recognizing that "here comes someone who speaks primarily English and lives in Los Angeles and makes $X per year". All this behaviour will be made possible by the dynamically updatable nature of cyberspace (in contrast to a library), and the fact that computer chips are still shrinking in size and in price. So just as today I walk around in "socialspace" — a web of social norms, expectation, and laws — tomorrow I will be walking around in an additional cyberspace of information that will support me (sometimes) and restrict me (other times) and delight me (I hope often) and frustrate me (I am sure).
= And your definition of the information society?
An information society is one in which people in general are aware of the importance of information as a commodity, and attach a price to it as a matter of course. Throughout history, some people have always understood how important information is, for their own benefit. But when the majority of society starts working with and on information per se, then the society can be called an information society. This may sound a bit vacuous or circularly defined, but I bet you that anthropologists can go and count what percentage of society was dedicated to information processing as a commodity in each society. Where they initially will find only teachers, rulers' councillors, and sages, they will in later societies find people like librarians, retired domain experts (consultants), and so on. The jumps in communication of information from oral to written to printed to electronic every time widened (in time and space) information dissemination, thereby making it less and less necessary to re-learn and re-do certain difficult things. In an ultimate information society, I suppose, you would state your goal and then the information agencies (both the cyberspace agents and the human experts) would conspire to bring you the means to achieve it, or to achieve it for you, minimizing the amount of work you'd have to do to only that is truly new or truly needs to be re-done with the material at hand.
CHRISTIANE JADELOT (Nancy, France)
#Researcher at the INALF (Institut national de la langue française - National
Institute of the French Language)
The purpose of the INaLF — part of the France's National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) — is to design research programmes on the French language, particularly its vocabulary. The INaLF's constantly expanding and revised data, processed by special computer systems, deal with all aspects of the French language: literary discourse (14th-20th centuries), everyday language (written and spoken), scientific and technical language (terminologies), and regional languages. This data, which is an very important study resource, is made available to people interested in the French language (teachers and researchers, business people, the service sector and the general public) through publications and databases.