THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE - STEPS TOWARDS THE REALIZATION OFCOMPUTER-SUPPORTED DISCOVERY ENVIRONMENTS

The tools that scientists use in their search processes together form so-called discovery environments. The promise of artificial intelligen ce and other branches of computer science is to radically transform co nventional discovery environments by equipping scientists with a range of powerful computer tools including large-scale, shared knowledge ba ses and discovery programs. We will describe the future computer-suppo rted discovery environments that may result, and illustrate by means o f a realistic scenario how scientists come to new discoveries in these environments, In order to make the step from the current generation o f discovery tools to computer-supported discovery environments Like th e one presented in the scenario, developers should realize that such e nvironments are large-scale sociotechnical systems. They should not ju st focus on isolated computer programs, but also pay attention to the question how these programs will be used and maintained by scientists in research practices. In order to help developers of discovery progra ms in achieving the integration of their tools in discovery environmen ts, we will formulate a set of guidelines that developers could follow . (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.