Fashionable trends and feasible strategies in information management

This paper analyses current trends in information management, considers the problems they involve, and suggests some strategies for tackling these problems. The current goal is integrated, personalised information systems, to be reached via artificial intelligence. The argument is that the extent to which this goal can be achieved is limited because these systems are intrinsically heterogeneous, are for access to information, and deal in linguistically-expressed information; so the best strategy for building the systems that can be attained is via linguistically-oriented knowledge and inference. Evaluating these systems also presents problems because each use is unique, but evaluation is much needed and large-sample strategies for performance study can be devised. In this paper I shall look at current trends in information management in an attempt to identify the real problems to be tackled and to suggest appropriate strategies for solving them.