Book•
The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization
01 Jan 2000-
TL;DR: The subject of this book is the systematized body of knowledge that constitutes this foundation of information organization, a conceptual framework that views the process of organizing information as the use of a special language of description called a bibliographic language.
Abstract: Instant electronic access to digital information is the single most distinguishing attribute of the information age The elaborate retrieval mechanisms that support such access are a product of technology But technology is not enough The effectiveness of a system for accessing information is a direct function of the intelligence put into organizing it Just as the practical field of engineering has theoretical physics as its underlying base, the design of systems for organizing information rests on an intellectual foundation The subject of this book is the systematized body of knowledge that constitutes this foundationIntegrating the disparate disciplines of descriptive cataloging, subject cataloging, indexing, and classification, the book adopts a conceptual framework that views the process of organizing information as the use of a special language of description called a bibliographic language The book is divided into two parts The first part is an analytic discussion of the intellectual foundation of information organization The second part moves from generalities to particulars, presenting an overview of three bibliographic languages: work languages, document languages, and subject languages It looks at these languages in terms of their vocabulary, semantics, and syntax The book is written in an exceptionally clear style, at a level that makes it understandable to those outside the discipline of library and information scienceDigital Libraries and Electronic Publishing series
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: The authors argue that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that they provide a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval.
Abstract: To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users can actually find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that they provide a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval.
251 citations
TL;DR: The philosophical relevance of this new language is explained, its syntactic and semantic structures are expounded and its possible implications for the growth of collective intelligence in cyberspace are pondered.
140 citations
TL;DR: Bibliometric maps cannot be expected ever to be fully equivalent to scholarly taxonomies, but they are valuable tools for assisting users’ to orient themselves to the information ecology.
Abstract: Knowledge organization (KO) and bibliometrics have traditionally been seen as separate subfields of library and information science, but bibliometric techniques make it possible to identify candidate terms for thesauri and to organize knowledge by relating scientific papers and authors to each other and thereby indicating kinds of relatedness and semantic distance. It is therefore important to view bibliometric techniques as a family of approaches to KO in order to illustrate their relative strengths and weaknesses. The subfield of bibliometrics concerned with citation analysis forms a distinct approach to KO which is characterized by its social, historical and dynamic nature, its close dependence on scholarly literature and its explicit kind of literary warrant. The two main methods, co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling represent different things and thus neither can be considered superior for all purposes. The main difference between traditional knowledge organization systems (KOSs) and maps based on citation analysis is that the first group represents intellectual KOSs, whereas the second represents social KOSs. For this reason bibliometric maps cannot be expected ever to be fully equivalent to scholarly taxonomies, but they are – along with other forms of KOSs – valuable tools for assisting users’ to orient themselves to the information ecology. Like other KOSs, citation-based maps cannot be neutral but will always be based on researchers’ decisions, which tend to favor certain interests and views at the expense of others.
137 citations
TL;DR: The underlying architecture of the DOI system is outlined, and two such efforts which are applying DOIs to content objects of scientific data are outlined.
Abstract: The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a system for identifying content objects in the digital environment. DOIs are names assigned to any entity for use on Internet digital networks. Scientific data sets may be identified by DOIs, and several efforts are now underway in this area. This paper outlines the underlying architecture of the DOI system, and two such efforts which are applying DOIs to content objects of scientific data.
110 citations
TL;DR: It is proposed that the study of information access can be facilitated through the recognition and examination of the physical, intellectual, and social aspects of Information access.
107 citations