November Chapter Meeting: The Ancient Secrets of Information Management

Summary

People who manage information have known since the 1970s that logic can be used to query information in databases, but the use of logic to organize information is not well understood by modern practitioners and has only recently been considered in the field of information science.  The author of Logic and the Organization of Information (Springer, 2012)  states "A greatly underappreciated and unused theoretical background to the organization of information is that of symbolic logic. (The monumental and authoritative Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition, 2009, does not have an entry for logic in its 6,856 pages)" (p 121).  Yet logic has been used (informally but effectively) to organize information for more than 700 years. 

What You Will Learn

• How the system of interconnected books used in double-entry bookkeeping since the 13th century is precisely consistent with the relational model and, therefore, first-order logic
• How cultural and historical factors have undermined recognition of important principles and the effective use of logic in modern organizations
• How logic education and practical application can help enterprise organizations overcome their most difficult and costly challenges in information management.

Speaker Profile

Ron Fuller is a consultant in information management and has taught in the database program at Bellevue College.  He spent 6 years at Microsoft where he helped build the world’s first terabyte-size OLAP cube and initiated some of the earliest internal BI projects.  As an Army Reserve officer he served as Deputy to the CTO for US Central Command, Directorate of Intelligence, and as Chief of Intelligence Systems for Afghanistan.  He lives in Redmond, WA with his wife Nicole and 4 children.