Lauren B. Doyle

Lauren B. Doyle (b. 1926) was a US developer of online retrieval systems.

Life

Lauren B. Doyle (b. 1926) earned a BS in chemistry at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, worked as a chemist, then joined the RAND corporation to write training documents and teach new programmers. He joined the System Development Corporation in 1957, developed online retrieval systems, and wrote various articles on information science.

Contributions

System Development Corporation; Involved with 2 of earliest online retrieval systems: BOLD and Protosynthex; Spring 1960 worked on SAGE system (Bellardo & Bourne); Wanted a practical system for reading, writing, answering questions in natural English; The result was Protosynthex I which he worked on with Robert Simmons. (Bellardo & Bourne); Research with Borko; Emphasis was between documentation and communication and linguistic research; They consider information science "a true interdisciplinary science involving the efforts of librarians, logicians, engineers, mathematicians, and behavior scientists" (Glynn Harmon).

Publications

Numerous publications are listed in Google Scholar. [1]

• "The microstatistics of text." Information Storage and Retrieval 1(4): 189-214 (1963).
• "Is Automatic Classification a Reasonable Application of Statistical Analysis of Text?" J. ACM 12(4): 473-489 (1965).
• "Associated characteristics of words in text." Commun. ACM 5(4): 223 (1962).
• "Information retrieval." Commun. ACM 4(4): 195 (1961)
• "Semantic Road Maps for Literature Searchers." J. ACM 8(4): 553-578 (1961)
• Information Retrieval and Processing. Los Angeles: Melville Publishing, 1975.
• "The Changing Horizon of Information Storage and Retrieval." With H. Borko. American Behavioral Scientist 7, no 10 (June 1964): 3-8. [2]
• Sixty ideas in Sixty months. Santa Monica: System Development Corp., 1964.

He also wrote an amusing article on the origins of the term "information retrieval: "I think, therefore IR." ACM SIGIR Forum 6, no. 2 (1971): 12-15. [3]

Further reading

• Doyle, L. B. Sixty ideas in sixty months. Santa Monica, CA: System Development Corporation. 1964. An account of the development if his ideas on the analysis and retrieval of information month by month July 1958 through June 1963. [4]
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Papers

See System Development Corporation for some papers relating to his work.