Anthony Debons’s research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places

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Publications (27)


The I-conference in retrospect
  • Article

April 2007

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10 Reads

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7 Citations

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Anthony Debons

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Glynn Harmon


Information System Failure: Analysis and Commentary.

January 2003

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28 Reads

Contemporary events of considerable significance to national and public welfare suggest that information was a significant force on the character and outcome of events such as the Chechen rebels held more than 700 hostages in the Dubrovku, Kremlin theater on October 23, 2002, the 9/11 terrorist attack, the Challenger shuttle accident, the Bhopal explosion. Identifying the success and failures of information systems in these events is relevant to national/private interests. In 1986, an aggregation of scholars met in Bad Windsheim, Germany to serve as lecturers in an Advanced Study Institute sponsored by the NATO's Science Division. The issues addressed were the prevailing methods used in the assessment of information system failure, the organizational factors pertaining thereof, the role of human cognitive variables, socio-economic-political variables, and the capacity of the system to resist failure. The paper summarizes these dimensions of information system failure as presented at the institute and comments on the importance of such systems based on contemporary socio-political circumstances.


Information Science: Forty Years of Teaching

January 2000

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28 Reads

Forty years of teaching Information Science at both the undergraduate and graduate levels has revealed that there is in fact a fundamental definition that can be used to describe the field and guide its development in the years to come. In short, that definition states "Information Science is the scholarly occupation that attempts to establish the principles and laws that govern the augmentation of human capacities through technology. This concept can be conveyed in teaching through the use of the EATPUTr system model. My long experience in the field has also revealed several basic requirements in the education of Information Science. These requirements are discussed within the paper.


Interrogative theory of information and knowledge

April 1999

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129 Reads

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61 Citations

ABSTRACT This report offers an interrogative-based approach,to differentiating and quantifying information and knowledge,within text. We examine the work of Popper, Shannon, Weaver, Brookes, and Debons on information and knowledge. We offer a new synthesis of their perspectives, which provides the theoretical background,for Interrogative Theory. Interrogative Theory suggests that text is a heterogeneous mixture of data, information, and knowledge, which can be separated and quantified through the interrogatives. Several exploratory research efforts based on this interrogative paradigm have been undertaken, including a study of the effects of differentiated information and knowledge,on problem solving. Data are presented from these studies. Applications of this approach are described including information system design, problem solving and decision making, text indexing, information overload, meta-data, and knowledge management. Keywords Interrogatives, Data, Information, Knowledge, Informs, Knowgs, Debons, Brookes, Shannon, Popper, Weaver


NATO Advanced Study Institutes of Information Science and Foundations of Information Science

September 1997

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8 Reads

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11 Citations

Journal of the American Society for Information Science

The purpose of this article is to give an account of the role that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), NATO Scientific Affairs Division, NATO Science Committee, Advanced Study Institutes, as well as the events preceding them at MITRE Corporation and the Electronic Systems Division, United States Air Force Systems Command had in the development of Information Science. These two activities, and others that preceded them, are presented from a historical perspective as a part of the evolution and development of Information Science. During this period (1960–1964), as the result of a number of converging initiatives, a synthesizing concept emerged that could be applied in undertaking the analysis and design of C2 (information) systems. This concept, grounded in cybernetics and related to the idea that all organisms are information systems, would constitute the framework for the analysis and design of such (C2) systems. This construct provided a basis for the generation and conduction of three MITRE/ESD congresses and later, the NATO Scientific Committee Advanced Study Institutes. The theoretical and technical challenge to an understanding of command and control (information) systems, and the importance and influence of this challenge in the evolution of Information Science, as a discipline, is discussed. The content of both the MITRE/ESD congresses and the four NATO Advanced Study Institutes are abstracted and presented. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Complex and Integrated Human-Machine Systems: Retroflections

January 1993

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5 Reads

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1 Citation

The proceedings of NATO Advanced Study Institutes provide invaluable data, information, and knowledge to scholars and students of a wide spectrum of theoretical and applied areas of interest. Given the educational objectives of the NATO Institutes, the proceedings represent a rich resource that can be used as reference and as texts for instruction. If this objective is to be achieved, one major task of the directors of these institutes is to assemble, assess, correlate, align, juxtapose the content of the formal presentations, deliberations and discourses in a manner that aids arriving at a synthesis of the intellectual content of the activity. The objective of this paper is to provide a method that can be used for this purpose.



Air Traffic Control and Systems Issues

January 1991

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13 Reads

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1 Citation

In this essay, the focus is on systems issues as they relate to air-traffic control (ATC). The first issue concerns the extent to which automation should be applied in ATC. The second issue refers to the ability of the present ATC information system to provide efficient and effective control in a rapidly expanding, complex air space environment. How can our present capability in obtaining information be extended to satisfy the need for greater human cognitive competence demanded by the environment? The third issue is to determine how best we can reap advantage from our knowledge of ATC failures in designing future ATC systems.


Citations (9)


... "Independently advancing transportation safety" (NTSB, 2016b), is the mission statement of the US National Transportation Safety Board, and the NTSB "determines the probable cause of the accidents and issues safety recommendations aimed at preventing future accidents" (NTSB, 2016a). The idea of drawing on experience from aviation in the study of information systems failure dates back to the 1980's (Wise & Debons, 1987). ...

Reference:

IT Project Failure, Termination and the Marginal Cost Trap
Information Systems: Failure Analysis
  • Citing Book
  • January 1987

... The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman 1989, Losee (1997, Machlup and Mansfield (1983), Debons and Cameron (1975), Larson and Debons (1983)). Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory. ...

Information Science in Action: System Design: Volume I
  • Citing Book
  • January 1983

... Global navigation systems provide a visual representation of the entire system and we suggest that these visual representations should reduce cognitive overload, that is, the additional effort and concentration necessary to maintain several tasks or trails at one time (Conklin, 1987). The use of anchors, or invariant features of the Web site (whose identity and location is always prominently highlighted on successive displays, such as site maps that are always visible), will help to reduce the load on users' cognitive resources (Tognazzine, 1998;Wise and Debons, 1987;Woods, 1984). Therefore, global navigation systems should aid users in recognizing their positions, thereby helping to decrease cognitive overload and disorientation. ...

Principles of Film Editing and Display System Design
  • Citing Article
  • September 1987

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting

... The above table-03 explicates location, time, and theme and host institution of iConference (Annabi, H., Fisher, K. and Mai, J. (2005) ; Harmon, G. (2006). Harmon, G. and Debons, A. (2006); Wiggins, A., McQuaid, M. J., and Adamic, L. A. (2008)). It is noted that the iConference held in the United States of America most of the time. ...

The I-conference in retrospect
  • Citing Article
  • April 2007

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

... Since many disciplines study information today, information, data, metadata, and knowledge also have current and emergent meanings. Definitions for these fundamental concepts in the many academic disciplines that study information and its variants (data, knowledge, wisdom, beliefs, etc.) however, continue to be widely divergent (Debons et al. 2005). The common sense approach established is outlined in Section 2. In Sections 3, 4, and 5 we define the concepts of data, information, and metadata, respectively. ...

Knowledge map of information science: Implications for the future of the field
  • Citing Article
  • October 2006

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

... These texts are stored in hardware and retrieved through software, which contains data, information, and knowledge, each with its own characteristics and value. According to Quigley and Debons (1999), a cognitive spectrum of data, information, and knowledge focus on data-as-thing, information-as-thing and knowledge-as-thing located within text strings. They reported an interrogative-based approach to differentiate and quantify information and knowledge within text. ...

Interrogative theory of information and knowledge
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • April 1999

... Hans Wellisch states that the expression, Information Science, was used for the first time in 1959 and Anthony Debons (1986) says that in 1962 the same expression appeared in the name of an international meeting, the Second International Congress on Information System Sciences, which took place in Hot Springs, Virginia (USA) (Lilley & Trice, 1989). In effect, by the 1970s, the expression enjoyed wide-spread acceptance in the USA and the area was more rapidly developed than in other countries. ...

Foundations of Information Science
  • Citing Article
  • December 1990

Advances in Computers

... There was agreement that the computerization of a command-and-control system might be considered as an information system (Aspry, 1999). As such "…the science and technology related to the command-and-control functions is primarily directed in achieving one objective, namely, aiding man to make the best use of the data about his environment for decision making (Debons, 1971). https://cppj.info/; ...

Command and Control: Technology and Social Impact
  • Citing Article
  • December 1971

Advances in Computers

... Se remplazó el paradigma mecánico por máquinas propiamente eléctricas, y el avance en poder de procesamiento se convirtió en una prioridad para las potencias.(Breton, 1991;Debons & Horne, 1997;Rayward, 1998).Los circuitos se miniaturizaron en 1947, cuando Bardeen, Brattain y Shockley crearon mini-tríodos reduciendo tamaño, gasto eléctrico y sobrecalentamiento, y aumentando la velocidad de respuesta: nacieron la electrónica de estado sólido y los transistores. Después, en 1959, Kilby y Noyce inventaron los circuitos integrados, iniciando la microelectrónica. ...

NATO Advanced Study Institutes of Information Science and Foundations of Information Science
  • Citing Article
  • September 1997

Journal of the American Society for Information Science