Abstract :
Due to information technologies the problem we are facing today is not a lack ofinformation but too much information. This phenomenon becomes very clear when we considertwo figures that are often quoted: Knowledge is doubling in many fields (biology, medicine,computer science,…) within some 6 years; yet information is doubling every 8 months! Thisimplies that the same piece of information/knowledge is published a large number of times withsmall variations.Just look at an arbitrary news item. If considered of some general interest reports of it willappear in all major newspapers, journals, electronic media, etc. This is also the problem withinformation portals that tie together a number of large databases.It is our contention that we need methods to reduce the huge set of information concerning aparticular topic to a number of pieces of information (let us call each such piece an “essay” inwhat follows) that present a good cross-section of potential points of view. We will explainwhy one essay is usually not enough, yet the problem of reducing a huge amount ofcontributions to a digestible number of essays is formidable, indeed is science fiction at themoment. We will argue in this paper that it is one of the important tasks of computer sciencesto start tackling this problem, and we will show that in some special cases partial solutions arepossible.
