Selecting the Contents of a Text Window II
To obtain more information about one of the publications attributed to Dr. Ausubel in the Author: Ausubel, F. window, double-click on the publication's title. In the figure we have double-clicked Arabidopsis thaliana mutant that develops as a light-grown plant in the absence of light.
A new window appears showing this reference in detail, including all the information which would normally be required for citation. The window's title is Paper: chory-1989-aaani, indicating that we are now examining a member of the Paper class. The name of this Paper class member consists of three parts: "chory" is derived from the first author's last name, "1989" is the year of publication, and "aaani" serves as a unique serial number in the database. All members of the Paper class are named in this fashion.
Notice that this window has a scroll bar on its left edge. The scroll bar indicates that additional information can be viewed. To see it, move the mouse pointer over the scroll bar. The pointer's shape will change into a vertical double arrow. The mouse buttons can now be used to scroll the window. Clicking once with the leftmost button will bump the scroll bar down a bit (moving the window contents up). Clicking the right button does the opposite. The middle mouse button allows you to actually slide the scroll bar. Hold the middle button down and then move the mouse to see this effect.
One of the terms in this window (anthocyanin) is labeled as a Keyword. Clicking twice on this term produces a window (titled Keyword: anthocyanin) showing all information in the database with which the keyword "anthocyanin" has been associated. Again the window title indicates which class the member "anthocyanin" belongs to. Notice that all of the items listed in this window are in boldface. Although we arbitrarily end this exercise here, we have not reached the end of this information chain. Double-clicking any boldface item would open a new window, itself containing linked information. The number of possible ways to continue the chain is clearly large.
Summary There are two important points to note about this exercise. First, information retrieval in ACeDB is accomplished by pointing at an item and double-clicking on it. In the windows we have looked at so far, many items have had this property. Second, members in different classes are connected to each other, making it possible to locate information in one class even if you have started your search in a different class. The example above started with a member of the Contact class and eventually involved members of the Author, Paper, and Keyword classes. Thus any time you search AAtDB, there will be many different search paths that lead to the same information. Where to start will depend on what is initially known. Clearly the multiplicity of routes is an advantage because for many searches it may not be known exactly how to get to a piece of information in advance.
We now turn our attention to another method for searching for information in ACeDB.