SIMS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval 

Final Exam Preparation Guide, Fall 2001

The SIMS 202 final exam will take place Monday December 10 from 9:30am-12:30pm in 202 South Hall. This will be an open-book, open-note exam. Please bring your own pen/pencils (to be fair, and to avoid printing issues, we won't be allowing computers during the midterm. It's ok if your handwriting isn't great.). We'll supply the paper. Each person will work individually. The exam period is three hours; we expect that it will take less time than this to complete, but be prepared to work quickly.

The exam is comprehensive, meaning it will cover both parts of the class. However, the emphasis will be on materials covered since the midterm.

Each question will be worth an indicated number of points. Partial credit will be awarded. In your answers, please balance conciseness with illustration of all of the requested information. (In other words, don't write a lot of things that aren't asked for, but try to address all of what is asked for.)

To study for the exam,

• Be sure you understand the material that was covered in lecture and have read and absorbed the corresponding material in the readings.
• Be sure you can do activities similar to what was done in the homework assignments.
• We will try to write some questions that require you to generalize from what you've learned and synthesize ideas. So be sure you have thought about the ideas covered in lecture, readings, and homeworks.

Below are shown the major topics we've covered since the midterm and some example questions. Please note that these are examples of the types of questions we will ask. They are (probably) not the exact questions we will ask. Furthermore, we will probably ask some other types of questions too, in particular the kind where we give you an example of some information and ask you to do something with it (design an ER diagram, convert to a hierarchy, etc.)

You should also review the material from the first half of the class; refer to the Midterm Practice Questions for examples.

• Topic: Information
• Example Questions:What is the information life cycle? What are different ways of measuring information? What are different ways of defining information? What are the main goals of the second half of this course?
• Topic: Metadata
• Example Questions:What are the motivations behind creating and using metadata systems like Dublin Core, MARC, AACR II, etc? What is the purpose of authority control? Is this a type of controlled vocabulary? Why or why not? What is a DTD? How do you create an XML representation of a print magazine?
• Topic: AI, Common Sense, and Ontologies
• Example Questions:You're at a friend's house and you are thirsty.  Your friend says to you: "There's water in the fridge."  List some common sense inferences that might be made from this statement.  List some inferences that would be unlikely to be made.  (Hint: Remember Marvin Minsky's definition of common sense.)  What are Howard Gardner's five "symptoms" of cognitive science?  Name some similarities and differences between older attempts to codify large bodies of knowledge (e.g., encyclopedias) and AI projects to codify common sense.
• Topic: Classification/Category Design
• Example Questions: What does Svenonius consider to be the primary difficulties with using controlled vocabularies? What are the differences between how hierarchical and faceted category structures are typically used in computer interfaces. Illustrate with examples we've discussed in class or homeworks. What is the relationship between attribute/value distinctions and category structure decisions? How is a classification thesaurus designed?
• Topic: Lexical Relations
• Example Questions: How is polysemy different than synonymy? What is the difference between syntax, semantics and pragmatics?  What approach to lexical semantics is used to define the meaning of terms in Wordnet?  What semantic relations are used in Wordnet?  Give an example of each relation.
• Topic: Information Extraction
• Example Questions: What are the basic techniques (levels of analysis) of information extraction?  Perform them on the following short newspaper story. [...]  How were recall and precision calculated in the evaluation of IE systems for the MUC competition?
• Topic: Cognition, Culture and Categories
• Example Questions: What is a metaphor?  Give an example metaphor.  What are some of the main differences between the "objectivist view" and Lakoff's view concerning thought and language?  What is a basic level category?  Give an example of a prototype effect.
• Topic: Web Site Design and Information Architecture
• Example Questions: What is information architecture?  What are the elements of information architecture?  What might be a good metaphor system to use in the design of a website devoted to [some activity or topic listed here]?  How can a search engine and a navigation system be integrated together in a website design?
• Topic: Database Design
• Example Questions: How is a database different than a file system? What are the benefits of a database system? What do we mean by data independence? What are the benefits/drawbacks of the major database models? Entity-Relations Diagrams -- what are they for, how do you create them? How do you normalize a relational model? What is a join?
• Topic: The Design Process
• Example Questions: How is the database design process similar to/different from the web site design process?