Based on the definition of information acquisition as the reduction in uncertainty, the concept of ignorance is defined as the state of uncertainty. Two basic types of ignorance are then defined as substitutes for information: guessing and belief. Two types of frequency distribution are presented as the most general dichotomy that can be applied to all possible types of frequency distribution and from them two limits are deduced between which all types of frequency distribution can be placed. Using games of chance—roulette and horse racing—as representatives of two basic types of frequency distribution, the comparison is presented of different results that can be theoretically obtained by the informed, the guessing, and the belief approaches. The value of information is a function of the type of frequency distribution of data that form its contents. The limits established for the types of frequency distribution are also boundary conditions for information value from nil to some finite number that depends also on the number of alternatives involved in case of a discrete set, and on range size, accuracy of measurement, and its precision in case of continuous parameters.
This article presents European documentalist, critical modernist, and Autonomous Marxist influenced post-Fordist views regarding the management of knowledge in mid- and late twentieth century Western modernity and postmodernity, and the complex theoretical and ideological debates, especially concerning issues of language and community. The introduction and use for corporate, governmental, and social purposes of powerful information and communication technologies created conceptual and political tensions and theoretical debates. In this article, knowledge management, including the specific recent approach known as "Knowledge Management," is discussed as a social, cultural, political, and organizational issue, including the problematic feasibility of capturing and representing knowledge that is "tacit," "invisible," and is imperfectly representable. "Social capital" and "affective labor" are discussed as elements of "tacit" knowledge. Views of writers in the European documentalist, critical modernist, and Italian Autonomous Marxist influenced post-fordist traditions, such as Otlet, Briet, Heidegger, Benjamin, Marazzi, and Negri, are discussed.(1)
Multiple authorship is a topic of growing concern in a number of scientific domains. When, as is increasingly common, scholarly articles and clinical reports have scores or even hundreds of authors - what Cronin (in press) has termed hyperauthorship - the precise nature of each individual's contribution is often masked. A notation that describes collaborators' contributions and allows those contributions to be tracked in, and across, texts (and over time) offers a solution. Such a notation should be useful, easy to use, and acceptable to communities of scientists. Drawing on earlier work, we present a proposal for an XML-like contribution mark-up, and discuss the potential benefits and possible drawbacks
Over the past few years, temporal information processing and temporal database management have increasingly become hot topics. Nevertheless, only a few researchers have investigated these areas in the Chinese language. This lays down the objective of our research: to exploit Chinese language processing techniques for temporal information extraction and concept reasoning. In this article, we first study the mechanism for expressing time in Chinese. On the basis of the study, we then design a general frame structure for maintaining the extracted temporal concepts and propose a system for extracting time-dependent information from Hong Kong financial news. In the system, temporal knowledge is represented by different types of temporal concepts (TTC) and different temporal relations, including absolute and relative relations, which are used to correlate between action times and reference times. In analyzing a sentence, the algorithm first determines the situation related to the verb. This in turn will identify the type of temporal concept associated with the verb. After that, the relevant temporal information is extracted and the temporal relations are derived. These relations link relevant concept frames together in chronological order, which in turn provide the knowledge to fulfill users' queries, e.g., for question-answering (i.e., Q&A) applications.
We here perform an analysis of all 1128 publications produced by scientists during their employment at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, a geophysical research laboratory founded in 1972 that currently employs 23 Ph.D.-level scientists. We thus assess research performance using as bibliometric indicators such statistics as publications per year, citations per paper, and cited half-lives. To characterize the research style of individual scientists and to obtain insight into the origin of certain publication-counting discrepancies, we classified the 1128 publications into four categories that differed significantly with respect to statistics such as lifetime citation rates, fraction of papers never-cited after 10 years, and cited half-life. The categories were: mainstream (prestige journal) publications -32.6 lifetime cit/pap, 2.4% never cited, and 6.9 year half-life; archival (other refereed)-12.0 lifetime cit/pap. 21.5% never cited, and 9.5 years half-life; articles published as proceedings of conferences-5.4 lifetime cit/pap, 26.6% never cited, and 5.4 years half-life; and "other" publications (news articles, book reviews, etc.)-4.2 lifetime cit/pap, 57.1% never cited, and 1.9 years half-life. Because determining cited half-lives is highly similar to a well-studied phenomenon in earthquake seismology, which was familiar to us, we thoroughly evaluate five different methods for determining the cited half-life and discuss the robustness and limitations of the various methods. Unfortunately, even when data are numerous the various methods often obtain very different values for the half-life. Our preferred method determines half-life from the ratio of citations appearing in back-to-back 5-year periods. We also evaluate the reliability of the citation count data used for these kinds of analysis and conclude that citation count data are often imprecise. All observations suggest that reported differences in cited half-lives must be quite large to be significant.
Theories of aboutness and theories of subject analysis and of related concepts such as topicality are often isolated from each other in the literature of information science (IS) and related disciplines. In IS it is important to consider the nature and meaning of these concepts, which is closely related to theoretical and metatheoretical issues in information retrieval (IR). A theory of IR must specify which concepts should be regarded as synonymous concepts and explain how the meaning of the nonsynonymous concepts should be defined.
This research is part of the ongoing study to better understand web page ranking on the web. It looks at a web page as a graph structure or a web graph, and tries to classify different web graphs in the new coordinate space: (out‐degree, in‐degree). The out‐degree coordinate od is defined as the number of outgoing web pages from a given web page. The in‐degree id coordinate is the number of web pages that point to a given web page. In this new coordinate space a metric is built to classify how close or far different web graphs are. Google's web ranking algorithm (Brin & Page, 1998 ) on ranking web pages is applied in this new coordinate space. The results of the algorithm has been modified to fit different topological web graph structures. Also the algorithm was not successful in the case of general web graphs and new ranking web algorithms have to be considered. This study does not look at enhancing web ranking by adding any contextual information. It only considers web links as a source to web page ranking. The author believes that understanding the underlying web page as a graph will help design better ranking web algorithms, enhance retrieval and web performance, and recommends using graphs as a part of visual aid for browsing engine designers.
The British controversy over the validity of Urquhart's and Garfield's Laws during the 1970s constitutes an important episode in the formulation of the probability structure of human knowledge. This controversy took place within the historical context of the convergence of two scientific revolutions-the bibliometric and the biometric-that had been launched in Britain. The preceding decades had witnessed major breakthroughs in understanding the probability distributions underlying the use of human knowledge. Two of the most important of these breakthroughs were the laws posited by Donald J. Urquhart and Eugene Garfield, who played major roles in establishing the institutional bases of the bibliometric revolution, For his part, Urquhart began his realization of S, C. Bradford's concept of a national science library by analyzing the borrowing of journals on interlibrary loan from the Science Museum Library in 1956. He found that 10% of the journals accounted for 80% of the loans and formulated Urquhart's Law, by which the interlibrary use of a journal is a measure of its total use. This law underlay the operations of the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLLST), which Urquhart founded. The NLLST became the British Library Lending Division (BLLD) and ultimately the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC), In contrast, Garfield did a study of 1969 journal citations as part of the process of creating the Science Citation Index (SCI) formulating his Law of Concentration, by which the bulk of the information needs in science can be satisfied by a relatively small, multidisciplinary core of journals. This law became the operational principle of the Institute for Scientific Information created by Garfield, A study at the BLLD under Urquhart's successor, Maurice B, Line, found low correlations of NLLST use with SCI citations, and publication of this study started a major controversy, during which both laws were called into question. The study was based on the faulty use of the Spearman rank-correlation coefficient, and the controversy over it was instrumental in causing B. C, Brookes to investigate bibliometric laws as probabilistic phenomena and begin to link the bibliometric with the biometric revolution. This paper concludes with a resolution of the controversy by means of a statistical technique that incorporates Brookes' criticism of the Spearman rank-correlation method and demonstrates the mutual supportiveness of the two laws.
This study is a follow-up to a published Correspondence Factorial Analysis (CFA) of a dataset of over 6 million bibliometric entries (Dore et al, JASIS, 47(8), 588-602,1996), which compared the publication output patterns of 48 countries in 18 disciplines over a 12-year period (1981-1992). It analyzes by methods suitable for investigating short time series how these output patterns evolved over the 12-year span. Three types of approach are described: (1) the chi(2) distances of the publication output patterns from the center of gravity of the multidimensional system-which represents an average world pattern-were calculated for each country and for each year. We noted whether the patterns moved toward or away from the center with time; (2) individual annual output patterns were introduced-as supplementary variables into an existing global overview covering the whole time-span [CFA map of (countries x disciplines)]. We observed how these patterns moved about within the map year by year; (3) the matrix (disciplines x time) was analyzed by CFA to derive time trends for each country. CFA revealed the "inner clocks" governing publication trends. The time scale that best fitted the data was not a linear but an elastic scale. Although different countries laid emphasis on publication in different disciplines, the overall tendency was toward greater uniformity in publication patterns with time.
The A. explores the view that interface metaphor is a term which carries with it a range of connotations, some of which have implications inimical to the design of effective interfaces. The study findings indicate that use of the term interface metaphor has influenced designers to assume that the insights offered by a metaphor more than offswet any problems arising from its limitations. It is argued here that, while this is correct from the designer's perspective, it is incorrect from that of the user. Part 1 discusses the emergence of, and theoretical justification for, the interface metaphor design principle ; part 2 discussed roles for tropes in the communication of new concepts and information ; part 3 reviews the cas study on which the paper is based ; part 4 discusses findings from the case study ; part 5 presents the conclusions, and some recommendations for future research
A user-centered investigation of interactive query expansion within the context of a relevance feedback system is presented in this article. Data were collected from 25 searches using the INSPEC database. The data collection mechanisms included questionnaires, transaction logs, and relevance evaluations. The results discuss issues that relate to query expansion, retrieval effectiveness, the correspondence of the on-line-to-off-line relevance judgments, and the selection of terms for query expansion by users (interactive query expansion). The main conclusions drawn from the results of the study are that: (1) one-third of the terms presented to users in a list of candidate terms for query expansion was identified by the users as potentially useful for query expansion. (2) These terms were mainly judged as either variant expressions (synonyms) or alternative (related) terms to the initial query terms. However, a substantial portion of the selected terms were identified as representing new ideas. (3) The relationships identified between the five best terms selected by the users for query expansion and the initial query terms were that: (a) 34% of the query expansion terms have no relationship or other type of correspondence with a query term; (b) 66% of the remaining query expansion terms have a relationship to the query terms. These relationships were: narrower term (46%), broader term (3%), related term (17%). (4) The results provide evidence for the effectiveness of interactive query expansion. The initial search produced on average three highly relevant documents; the query expansion search produced on average nine further highly relevant documents. The conclusions highlight the need for more research on: interactive query expansion, the comparative evaluation of automatic vs. interactive query expansion, the study of weighted Web-based or Web-accessible retrieval systems in operational environments, and for user studies in searching ranked retrieval systems in general.
Journal of the American Society for Information ScienceVolume 51, Issue 11 p. 1061-1062 Book Review Book review: New organizational designs: Information aspects, by Bob Travica Patricia F. Katopol, Patricia F. Katopol [email protected] The Aspen Institute, Communications and Society ProgramSearch for more papers by this author Patricia F. Katopol, Patricia F. Katopol [email protected] The Aspen Institute, Communications and Society ProgramSearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 August 2000 https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-4571(2000)51:11<1061::AID-ASI1008>3.0.CO;2-LRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume51, Issue112000Pages 1061-1062 RelatedInformation
Journal of the American Society for Information ScienceVolume 51, Issue 10 p. 963-964 Book Review Book review: U.S. government on the Web: Getting the information you need, by Peter Hernon, John A. Shuler, and Robert E. Dugan Mike Steckel, Mike Steckel [email protected] Texas Department of Economic Development, P.O. Box 12728, Austin, TX 78711Search for more papers by this author Mike Steckel, Mike Steckel [email protected] Texas Department of Economic Development, P.O. Box 12728, Austin, TX 78711Search for more papers by this author First published: 16 June 2000 https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-4571(2000)51:10<963::AID-ASI90>3.0.CO;2-3Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume51, Issue102000Pages 963-964 RelatedInformation
Five-hundred twenty-seven full bibliographic records containing URLs were downloaded from SCISEARCH as part of an exploration of the extent of Web publication of electronic research-related information (E-RRI) in the sciences and classified as to resource type, subject area, and degree of intellectual property protection. Four hundred eighty-five records represented nonduplicate descriptions of data compilations (194), software (153), Websites (73), electronic documents (49), and digitized images (17). The greatest concentration of E-RRI was found in molecular biology (QP=123), general natural history and biology (QH=84), and medicine (R=74). Roughly two-thirds of the 410 accessible Webpages (67%) permitted totally free and unrestricted public access and use of the information; 11% requested citation of a related journal article as acknowledgment of use; the remainder stated conditions for use or relied on a statement of copyright as an indication of ownership. The World Wide Web appears to have become a significant channel for scientists to distribute databases, software, and other information related to their published research.
