Roger K. Summit

Last updated
Roger K. Summit
Born1930 (age 93–94)
Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Nationality American
Education Stanford University

Roger Kent Summit (born 1930) is the founder of Dialog Information Services, and has been called the father of modern online search. He worked for Lockheed in the 1960s, was put in charge of its information retrieval lab, and from his work created a system that became known as Dialog and spun off by Lockheed in the 1970s. Dialog is one of the leading professional online services, used by companies, law firms, governments etc. as a key online research tool. Many feel that Dialog led the way to the Web's search engines and search today.

Contents

Early life

Roger Kent Summit was born in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, where both his parents were teachers. His father was also a guidance counselor and played piano and organ for silent films. [1] Summit himself is musically gifted. He played trombone in high school and made money in college using his talent to play in dance bands. He also learned to play the horn. Summit vacationed in the West Coast in the summer of 1941 when he was 11 years old. It was the first time he had seen the mountains and the ocean, and the experience never left him. Later in life he decided to attend college at Stanford because of this early experience. [2] He continues to reside there.

Middle years

Summit holds a doctorate in management science, a master's in business administration, and a bachelor's in psychology, all from Stanford University. When he was a doctoral candidate at Stanford University in 1960, he took a summer job at Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. to improve information retrieval methods, and in 1962 was appointed designer and project manager at Lockheed. [3] When the Lockheed Corporation formed the Information Sciences Laboratory (1964) their mission for the lab was to examine how third-generation hardware would affect computing in the information sciences. Third-generation hardware, typified by the IBM 360 computer, introduced mass random-access storage, remotely controlled processing via telecommunications, and a time-sharing operation that allowed many people to utilize the computer at the same time. Roger Summit and a colleague submitted a proposal to the Lockheed Corporation to further explore and develop this technology. He was then given responsibility for information retrieval. Organizations were already conducting searches by inputting queries on punched cards. However, searches couldn't be revised after they were entered and during the process, therefore the outcomes of the search were at times unpredictable. The equipment that they were using was considered second generation equipment. Summit's goal was to design an interactive retrieval language with third generation equipment that would by pass some of the problems they had with the second generation equipment [4]

In 1968 Summit and his colleagues at Lockheed won a major contract from NASA to develop an online retrieval system for its database of aerospace research documents. Later, they won contracts to apply this technology to the databases of the Atomic Energy Commission, the European Space and Research Organization, the U.S. Office of Education, and the National Technical Information Service. In early 1972 Summit and his team offered the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) and the National Technical Information Service, databases to any subscriber with a computer terminal. This is when Dialog was established as a commercial information retrieval business within Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, and became the world's first commercial online service.

In 1982, Dialog turned out in a wholly owned subsidiary with Roger Summit as president. In 1988, he participated in the sale of Dialog to Knight- Ridder Inc., and in February 1990 he was named president of its electronic publishing group. One year later, he assumed the office of chairman and chief executive officer until his retirement in late 1991. [5]

Family

Summit is married to author Virginia M. Summit. They were married in 1964 and have two children. Their eldest child, Jennifer Summit, is the Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University. Their son, Scott Summit, is CTO of the medical device company Bespoke Innovations.

Dialog

Development

In 1960, while employed at Lockheed Missiles and Space, Summit learned that it was often easier, cheaper, and faster to redo research on a topic rather than trying to figure out whether specific information already existed (Summit, 2002). [4] He saw the potential in information retrieval systems, ultimately changing the future of research. With the new IBM technology, and Lockheed's general practice of ‘redoing research’ rather than wasting time, Summit had convinced Lockheed to support him in furthering research of information retrieval. One important criteria was that computer programmers would not be needed to conduct searches. The system would be interactive to allow searches and queries to be modified easily (also known as recursion), and that it would provide alphabetical displays of all the items one could choose from (also known as indexing) (Summit, 2002). [4]

The team Summit was now working with consisted of six people (himself included)

Some of the problems Summit hoped to overcome were [6]

Summit and his team were striving to create a system that was adaptable. The system would allow users to gain the desired search outcome they sought in an easy and efficient manner. In 1965, they had developed a working prototype of Dialog and sought to have the prototype tested in a real situation using NASA's STAR database. When Summit's proposal was rejected over the Bunker Ramo System, he did not give up and instead created a smaller scale proposal, with minimized economic investment, for an experiment with Dialog to run parallel to Bunker Ramo. The minimalist proposal at the Ames Research Center proved to be more successful than the Bunker Ramo System leading to Dialog earning a contract with NASA in 1966 (Summit, 2002). [4] Information searches within the NASA STAR database went from taking 14 hours, plus shipping and handling, to a few minutes with Summit's Dialog system. Dialog was proving to be so much faster and efficient than anything seen before and in 1967, they received an award to develop the NASA RECON system. Dialog was associated with creating the first national network of terminals involving a large-scale database of 400,000 aerospace citations.

The success of NASA RECON led to many other contracts. Under Dr. Summit's direction, various versions of Dialog called RECON were installed in the 1960s for such government agencies as the U.S Atomic Energy Commission and the European Space Agency. Then, in 1969, the US Office of Education negotiated a contract to put their database on the Dialog system. In this contract, teachers and researchers would only be given access to search functions. The ERIC database (only offering educational materials) was the first, extensive, nationwide application that was a non-defense related online information retrieval service. This service was carried out through several centers around the country, and ultimately changed Dialog's business from installation of a system- to providing services of a system (Summit, 2002). [4]

By 1972, Summit once again made a proposition and had convinced Lockheed that with the competition in the field, and the success of their work, they needed to go commercial. It was then that Dialog was established as a commercial information retrieval business. It became an independent company and was a success from that point on (Summit, 2002). [4] In 1981, Dialog Information Services became a subsidiary of Lockheed Corporation and in 1988 they were purchased for $353 million by Knight-Ridder, Inc. By 1995, Dialog Information Services became Knight-Ridder Information Inc. In 1997, they were purchased by M.A.I.D PLC for $420 million and became The Dialog Corporation.

Impact

Hailed as the 'Father of Online Systems,' Summit's work on DIALOG changed the information industry and provided a foundation for further research and development. Databases such as ERIC, LexisNexis, ProQuest, EBSCOHost among others all owe much to Roger Summit and the creation of DIALOG. The work with DIALOG would pave the way for today's leading online search engines like Yahoo! and Google. It shaped the growth of the online industry improving search capabilities. Having precise search capabilities was a product of Dialog's added large and consistent formatted databases and the incorporation of a search language (i.e. Boolean phrases). By providing a wider range of databases for users to search through, DIALOG allowed for the ability to multi-task in search. Users could find solutions with one query instead of running a separate search at a later time. [7]

Current challenges

1) In 2008, Proquest announced the need to update Dialog's platform. This new platform would integrate Dialog and DataStar offerings. Legacy systems such as Dialog's need complete reworking to meet the challenges of the future—or even the present. ProQuest embarked on a major platform design project to integrate ProQuest and CSA content into a "best of breed", Web 2.0-level service. Unified access remained incomplete until 2010, necessitating continued decision-making on the part of researchers (Quint, 2008) [8]

2) One of the barriers to transforming Dialog has always been restrictive clauses in Dialog's contracts with database producers, some of which date back 30 years or more. Contract problems affect both pricing rigidity and how the service can handle data. There was a need for extensive discussions with groups of information professionals about what they want and need from a newly designed system. By working on the integration process, content gaps were plugged by developing new databases (Quint, 2008) [8]

Today

As of January 2011, ProQuest had been busy as it had its hands full with integrating multiple legacy platforms. It took the company until August 2010 to launch a first release of the new “ ProQuest Dialog,” which offers a subset of Dialog and DataStar content intended for use by end users in the pharmaceutical/biomedical customer community where it planned a phased release for other content and markets. At that same time, ProQuest also started to preview its new ProQuest platform with content from ProQuest and CSA plus some from Chadwyck Healy. Not until November 2010 did the first library go live on the new platform. Then, in December 2010, ProQuest acquired the Congressional Information Service and University Publications of America product lines from LexisNexis (Keiser, 2011) [9]

The new ProQuest platform is just beginning to be exposed and won't be finished for years—an ambitious undertaking. Recently announced is a partnership with libraries for a multi-year European book digitization project—a multimillion-dollar investment. These initiatives, plus the e-brary purchase, are all in fulfillment of the company's mission “to connect people and information.” (Keiser, 2011) [9]

Later years

In 1998, Summit was appointed to the board of directors at Dialog. [10]

Even with his substantial amount of participation with Dialog, Summit has been involved with many other professional ventures as well. [10] He has contracted with companies such as Thomson Corporation and ProQuest Company. [11]

Summit has been a frequent lecturer on the field of information sciences, has been widely published, and has been part of many national committees [10] dealing with information policy, such as the Association of Independent Information Professionals. [11] Stanford University Library Advisory Council, Sanford Jazz Workshop Board of Directors.

Awards and recognition

From the Professional Biography [12] of Dr. Summit, below is a partial list of the numerous awards and recognitions he has received (in ascending order)

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

In computing, a search engine is an information retrieval software system designed to help find information stored on one or more computer systems. Search engines discover, crawl, transform, and store information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The most widely used type of search engine is a web search engine, which searches for information on the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Center for Biotechnology Information</span> Database branch of the US National Library of Medicine

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by US Congressman Claude Pepper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information science</span> Academic field concerned with collection and analysis of information

Information science is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. Practitioners within and outside the field study the application and the usage of knowledge in organizations in addition to the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding the information systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ProQuest</span> Distributor of eBooks and digital media

ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene Power.

MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Westlaw</span> Online legal research service

Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over 15 million records of publications developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on astronomy and physics. Abstracts are freely available for most articles, and fully scanned articles may be available in Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Document Format (PDF). Hosted papers may be from peer reviewed or non-peer-reviewed sources. ADS is managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts represented in databases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Text Retrieval Conference</span> Meetings for information retrieval research

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an ongoing series of workshops focusing on a list of different information retrieval (IR) research areas, or tracks. It is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and began in 1992 as part of the TIPSTER Text program. Its purpose is to support and encourage research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies and to increase the speed of lab-to-product transfer of technology.

Dialog is an online information service owned by ProQuest, who acquired it from Thomson Reuters in mid-2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

ND-NOTIS was a office automation suite by Norsk Data introduced in the early 80s, running on the SINTRAN III platform on both ND-100 and ND-500 architectures. It was also available on Microsoft Windows running in networks of Norsk Data servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">InfoTrac</span> Full-text scholarly online database

InfoTrac is a family of full-text databases of content from academic journals and general magazines, of which the majority are targeted to the English-speaking North American market. As is typical of online proprietary databases, various forms of authentication are used to verify affiliation with subscribing academic, public, and school libraries. InfoTrac databases are published by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.

BRS/Search is a full-text database and information retrieval system. BRS/Search uses a fully inverted indexing system to store, locate, and retrieve unstructured data. It was the search engine that in 1977 powered Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS) commercial operations with 20 databases ; it has changed ownership several times during its development and is currently sold as Livelink ECM Discovery Server by Open Text Corporation.

RetrievalWare is an enterprise search engine emphasizing natural language processing and semantic networks which was commercially available from 1992 to 2007 and is especially known for its use by government intelligence agencies.

Cognitive models of information retrieval rest on the mix of areas such as cognitive science, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and library science. They describe the relationship between a person's cognitive model of the information sought and the organization of this information in an information system. These models attempt to understand how a person is searching for information so that the database and the search of this database can be designed in such a way as to best serve the user. Information retrieval may incorporate multiple tasks and cognitive problems, particularly because different people may have different methods for attempting to find this information and expect the information to be in different forms. Cognitive models of information retrieval may be attempts at something as apparently prosaic as improving search results or may be something more complex, such as attempting to create a database which can be queried with natural language search.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to search engines.

INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1970s.

Evaluation measures for an information retrieval (IR) system assess how well an index, search engine, or database returns results from a collection of resources that satisfy a user's query. They are therefore fundamental to the success of information systems and digital platforms.

References

  1. ↑ "Roger Summit". University of Washington. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  2. ↑ Bjørner, Susanne. "Online Before the Internet, Part 4: Early Pioneers Tell Their Stories: Roger Summit". Information Today, Inc. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  3. ↑ Summit, Roger. "Knight-Ridder and Online Information". University of South Carolina. Retrieved 7 July 2011.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Summit, Roger. "Reflections on the Beginnings of Dialog The Birth of Online Information Access" . Retrieved 8 July 2011.
  5. ↑ "Professional Biography of Dr. Roger K. Summit Chairman Emeritus, Dialog" (PDF). Dialog. Retrieved 7 July 2011.
  6. ↑ Summit, Roger. "THE NEW INFORMATION PARADIGM THREAT OR OPPORTUNITY (OR BOTH)?". National Federation of Advanced Information Services. Retrieved 9 July 2011.
  7. ↑ "Online Before the Internet: Early Pioneers Tell Their Stories Part 4". infotoday.com. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
  8. 1 2 "ProQuest Dialog: Predictions and Reactions". 19 June 2008.
  9. 1 2 "Dialog: Change, Stability, and Challenges". Archived from the original on 2012-03-21.
  10. 1 2 3 Professional Biography of Dr. Roger K. Summit Chairman Emeritus
  11. 1 2 Roger Summit LinkedIn profile
  12. ↑ "Professional Biography of Dr. Roger K. Summit Chairman Emeritus, Dialog" (PDF). Thompson Dialog. Retrieved 9 July 2011.
  13. ↑ "Miles Conrad Award and Lectures | NISO website".
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