Research Journal, Part 9

Research Journal, Part 9: Finding Information on the Open Web

    for any readers other than my CTEC 115 instructor that do not know what the elements of ASPECT are. 

   Finding information on the open web is one of my favorite things to do. I look up some kind of information daily and on some days looking up multiple subjects for both personal and academic purposes. 

half of everything I learned about fixing cars is from the web, the other half I learned from my father. When ever I fix my cars and if there is something I don't know how to do I usually visit the same site now. Before I found that site I did a little research so that I could find the site that gives the best information and suites my needs. Other personal research I frequently use the web for is recipes, building and fixing things around home  and finding new places to take my kids hiking.  I am always looking for new and exciting places to take them hiking.  How do you trust the sites you use for personal and/or academic reasons? Use the ASPECT system to evaluate them. ASPECT is an acronym for Authority, Sources, Purpose, Evenness, Coverage, and Timeliness. This system is especially important to keep in mind when conducting searches for academic research and sources. 

      I recently conducted four searches through the Alta Vista search engine where I could make four separate searches filtering the search by domain. They are .com, .org.,.edu, and .gov.

  .org search:

   while conducting the .org search two sites that show up frequently and near the top of the list searching the keywords artificial intelligence and robotics are Wikipedia and spectrum.ieee.org. They are not one's I looked at for this search since I have seen them before. The one site I looked into was Swissnex.

swissnexsanfrancisco.org  

 swissnex is a group of scientists from switzerland and the United states dedicated to Science, education, art, and innovation. They have some interesting links to artificial intelligence. To evaluate they have an "about us"

link and a contacts link. There they have pics of some of the members with info about them. What there education, experience, background and other credentials are as well as a mission statement link stating their purpose. This covers both the Authority and the purpose elements of ASPECT. 

.edu search:

   While conducting the .edu search on artificial intelligence and robotics I found the Stanford school of Engineering site.  http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=86cc8662-f6e4-43c3-a1be-b30d1d179743. This site is one for the introduction to robotics course at Stanford. The main page states its purpose with "The purpose of this course is to introduce you to basics of modeling, design, planning, and control of robot systems". The main page also shows a pic and info of the professor with background information on experience and education. Again this info covers both Authority and Purpose. 

.com search:

  my .com search brought me to the robotics technology center - robotics for developers site. 

This site seems to be aimed at educating and informing with news on the subject. It is also used as a discussion forum. Although it is a very large and interesting site I would not use it for academic research in sources. It would be a good place to start research though to find subtopics and possibly other sources. The main page has news articles on the subjects of artificial intelligence and robotics and the author of them is John. ????? John What?

Thats the author just John with no contact information, sources or no about us page with members showing any credentials on the subject. In using ASPECT there are no sources and no authority here. 

.gov search: (the easiest)

 My .gov search brought me to nasa.gov. Who hasn't heard of NASA? I think that when conducting searches .gov sites are usually a safe bet for information especially since there are more strict web standards today that companies must follow when launching web sites. The authority element is in the domain itself  .gov (which is the domain for government organizations.)