KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION · Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.1 KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION Official Journal of the International Society for Knowledge Organization ISSN 0943 – 7444 International

Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.1

KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION Official Journal of the International Society for Knowledge Organization ISSN 0943 – 7444

International Journal devoted to Concept Theory, Classification, Indexing and Knowledge Representation

Contents Editorial Richard P. Smiraglia. Keywords Redux—An Editorial ....................................................3 Articles Devika P. Madalli, B. Preedip Balaji, and Amit Kumar Sarangi. Faceted Ontological Representation for a Music Domain .........................................................................8 Bernard Ijesunor Akhigbe, Babajide Samuel Afolabi, and Emmanuel Rotimi Adagunodo. Modelling User-Centered Attributes: The Web Search Engine as a Case ...............................................25 Brief Communication Sami Ullah Bajwa, Naveda Kitchlew, Khuram Shahzad, and Khaliq Ur Rehman. Phronesis Knowledge as Enabler of Intuitive Decision Making .............................................................40

Classification Issues Nancy J. Williamson. Categories, Contexts and Relations in Knowledge Organization: The 12th International ISKO Conference, Mysore, India ..................................................................................50 Gems from Our Digitization Project Ingetraut Dahlberg. The Terminology of Subject-fields .............................................56 Books Recently Published ........................................................64 Index to Volume 41 (2014) ........................................................65


KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION KO Official Journal of the International Society for Knowledge Organization ISSN 0943 – 7444

International Journal devoted to Concept Theory, Classification, Indexing and Knowledge Representation KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION This journal is the organ of the INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION (General Secretariat: Amos DAVID, Université de Lorraine, 3 place Godefroy de Bouillon, BP 3397, 54015 Nancy Cedex, France. E-mail: [email protected].

Editors Richard P. SMIRAGLIA (Editor-in-Chief), School of Information Stud-ies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Northwest Quad Building B, 2025 E Newport St., Milwaukee, WI 53211 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Nancy WILLIAMSON (Classification Research News Editor), Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G6 Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Melodie J. FOX (Review Editor), School of Information Studies, Uni-versity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Northwest Quad Building B, 2025 E Newport St., Milwaukee, WI 53211 USA.

Jihee BEAK (Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief), School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Northwest Quad Building B, 2025 E Newport St., Milwaukee, WI 53211 USA.

Hailey E. STRICKON (Editorial Assistant), School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Northwest Quad Building B, 2025 E Newport St., Milwaukee, WI 53211 USA.

Editors Emerita Hope A. OLSON, School of Information Studies, University of Wis-consin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Northwest Quad Building B, 2025 E Newport St., Milwaukee, WI 53211 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Clare BEGHTOL, Faculty of Information Studies, University of To-ronto, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Ingetraut DAHLBERG, Am Hirtenberg 13, 64732 Bad Ko ̈nig, Germa-ny. E-mail: [email protected]

Editorial Board Jonathan FURNER, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 300 Young Dr. N, Mail-box 951520, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Jesús GASCÓN GARCÍA, Facultat de Biblioteconomia i Docu-mentació, Universitat de Barcelona, C. Melcior de Palau, 140, 08014 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]

Claudio GNOLI, University of Pavia, Mathematics Department Li-brary, via Ferrata 1, I-27100 Pavia, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]

Rebecca GREEN, Assistant Editor, Dewey Decimal Classification, Dewey Editorial Office, Library of Congress, Decimal Classification Division , 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington, DC 20540-4330, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

José Augusto Chaves GUIMARÃES, Departamento de Ciência da Infromação, Universidade Estadual Paulista–UNESP, Av. Hygino Muzzi Filho 737, 17525-900 Marília SP Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]

Birger HJØRLAND, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]

Barbara H. KWASNIK, School of Information Studies, Syracuse Uni-versity, Syracuse, NY 13244 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

María J. LÓPEZ-HUERTAS. Universidad de Granada, Facultad de Bib-lioteconomía y Documentación, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, Bib-lioteca del Colegio Máximo de Cartuja, 18071 Granada, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]

Kathryn LA BARRE, The Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 E. Daniel Street, MC-493, Champaign, IL 61820-6211 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Marianne LYKKE, e-Learning Lab, Center for User-driven Innovation, Learning and Design, Department of Communication, Aalborg Univer-sity, Kroghstraede 1, room 2.023 Denmark 9220 Aalborg OE. E-mail: [email protected]

Ia MCILWAINE (Literature Editor), Research Fellow. School of Li-brary, Archive & Information Studies, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT U.K. E-mail: [email protected]

Jens-Erik MAI, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Co-penhagen Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]

Widad MUSTAFA el HADI, Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3, URF IDIST, Domaine du Pont de Bois, Villeneuve d’Ascq 59653, France. E-mail: [email protected]

H. Peter OHLY, Prinzenstr. 179, D-53175 Bonn, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

K. S. RAGHAVAN, KAnOE (Centre for Knowledge Analytics & Onto-logical Engineering), PES Institute of Technology, 100 Feet Ring Road, BSK 3rd Stage, Bangalore 560085, India. E-mail: [email protected].

M. P. SATIJA, Guru Nanak Dev University, School of Library and In-formation Science, Amritsar-143 005, India. E-mail: [email protected]

Aida SLAVIC, UDC Consortium, PO Box 90407, 2509 LK The Hague, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

Dagobert SOERGEL, Department of Library and Information Studies, Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo, 534 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260-1020. E-mail: [email protected]

Renato R. SOUZA, Applied Mathematics School, Getulio Vargas Foundation, Praia de Botafogo, 190, 3o andar, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22250-900, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]

Joseph T. TENNIS, The Information School of the University of Washington, Box 352840, Mary Gates Hall Ste 370, Seattle WA 98195-2840 USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Maja ŽUMER, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Askerceva 2, Ljubljana 1000 Slovenia. E-mail: [email protected]


R.P. Smiraglia. Keywords Redux—An Editorial

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Keywords Redux— An Editorial*

Richard P. Smiraglia

Smiraglia, Richard P. Keywords Redux—An Editorial. Knowledge Organization. 42(1), 3-7. 3 references.

* The data reported in this editorial were gathered by Hyoungjoo Park, to whom I am most grateful. In KO volume 40 number 3 (2013) I included an editorial about keywords—both about the absence prior to that date of designated keywords in articles in Knowledge Organi-zation, and about the misuse of the idea by some other journal publications (Smiraglia 2013). At the time I was chagrined to discover how little correlation there was across the formal indexing of a small set of papers from our journal, and especially to see how little correspondence there was between actual keywords appearing in the pub-lished texts, and any of the indexing supplied by either Web of Science or LISTA (Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science™ (WoS) and EBSCOHost’s Library and Information Science and Technology Abstracts with Full Text (LISTA). The idea of a keyword arose in the early days of automated indexing, when it was discovered that using terms that actually oc-curred in full texts (or, in the earliest days, in titles and ab-stracts) as search “keys,” usually in Boolean combinations, provided fairly precise recall in small, contextually confined text corpora. A recent Wikipedia entry (Keywords 2015) embues keywords with properties of structural reasoning, but notes that they are “key” among the most frequently occurring terms in a text corpus. The jury is still out on whether keyword retrieval is better than indexing with sub-ject headings, but in general, keyword searches in large, un-structured text corpora (which is what we have today) are imprecise and result in large recall sets with many irrelevant hits (see the recent analysis by Gross, Taylor and Joudrey (2014). Thus it seems inadvisable to me, as editor, espe-cially of a journal on knowledge organization, to facilitate imprecise indexing of our journal’s content.

Nevertheless, during 2014, in Knowledge Organization vol-ume 41, I added lists of keywords below the abstracts of each article. I deliberately did not ask authors to supply keywords. Rather, I developed a set for each article by en-tering the complete text into the Voyeur tool from Herme-neutica.ca (http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/). I did not use the simple list of most frequently occurring words pro-

vided by Voyeur; rather I used that list to inform my compilation of terms (preferring “knowledge or-ganization” as a term, to the key-words “knowledge” and “organization,” for example). In the rare event that an important concept represented in the title of an article did not fall into this list, I added terms to represent that concept as well, after first checking to be certain the term actually occurred in the text of the article. In this manner, Knowledge Organization managed to complete a full year of publication with “keywords.” I was amused on occasion, when authors asked to replace our keywords with terms of their own, none of which actually occurred anywhere in their texts. I decided to place a notice in the instructions for manuscript submission indicating that au-thor keywords are not used, but that our keywords are supplied in conjunction with Voyeur text analysis. 2.0 Case study redux As the end of the volume year approached I decided to revisit my earlier case study to see whether the presence of keywords in our publication had had any effect on in-dexing. To do so, I gathered comparative data using the first article in each number of volume 41—admittedly a convenience sample with no potential for generalizability. Table 1 shows the results of that comparison, giving the keywords from KO, alongside indexing discovered in ei-ther WoS or LISTA.

LISTA has not yet indexed much of the volume as of January 2015); the final issue has not yet been indexed by either WoS or SCOPUS. SCOPUS uses the supplied key-words, which, like the others, it identifies as “author key-words.” In two cases WoS did not add to the keywords that were already present, but in two cases they did add “keywords plus.” Gratifyingly, “knowledge organization” is one of those. It would seem we have convinced WoS



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indexers that the term “knowledge organization” is some-thing we take seriously. At least LISTA did not apply knowledge management terms, as was the case in the prior review, although the outdated early twentieth century term “library science” appears. (For an informative rant on that term see my blog post “Grocery Store Science” at https://lazykoblog.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/grocery-store-science/.) 3.0 The use of keywords in our

closest “sibling” journals Curious to discover whether the journals closest to us in-tellectually use keywords, and if so, how, I decided to compare keywords for two years in Journal of Documenta-tion and Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. We collected data for the first article in each is-sue of each journal in 2013 and 2014. Again this is purely a convenience sample for the purpose of generating basic information, thus I will not report quantitative results.

The guidelines from Journal of Documentation (JDoc) ask authors to provide keywords, but make it clear editorial prerogatives will be enforced (http://www.emeraldgroup publishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm? id=jd):

Please provide up to 10 keywords on the Article Ti-tle Page, which encapsulate the principal topics of the paper …. Whilst we will endeavour to use sub-mitted keywords in the published version, all key-words are subject to approval by Emerald’s in house editorial team and may be replaced by a mat-ching term to ensure consistency.

In JDoc keywords appear at the bottom of the abstract with the header “keywords.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) does not men-tion keywords in its instructions for authors and no key-words appear in the texts of the articles. However, a list of keywords accompanies the article citation and abstract in the ASIST Digital Library online. Those same key-

Knowledge Organization issue

Article KO supplied keywords WoS Keywords Plus LISTA subject

headings

41n1 2014 Olesun-Bagneux

“The Memory Li-brary”

library, memory, lit-erature, Pinakes, Aristophanes, me-chanics, scholars, Al-exandria

library science; infor-mation science; librar-ies; classification of books; information re-trieval; Alexandria (Egypt); Egypt

41n2 2014 Ménard and Dorey

“TIIARRA”

images, participants, TIARRA, retrieval, taxonomy, categories, indexing, efficiency

American history; re-trieval

taxonomy, digital im-ages, websites, bilin-gualism, statistics, nglish language

41n3 2014 Satija, Madalli and Dutta

“Modes of Growth of Subjects”

knowledge, subjects, growth, Ranganathan

knowledge; classifica-tion; systems

not in LISTA

41n4 2014 Szostak

“Classifying the Humanities”

art, classification, classifying, works, scholarship, humani-ties, concepts, sub-jects

knowledge organiza-tion; information-seeking

not in LISTA

41n5 2014 Shiri

“Making Sense of Big Data”

Big Data, facet analy-sis, research, meta-data

not in LISTA

41n6 2014 Budd

“Organizing Acts and Objects”

metaphysics, knowl-edge organization, knowledge, objects, acts, informing, in-formation

not in WoS not in LISTA

Table 1. Comparative Keywords from KO, WoS, and LISTA.



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words are supplied in the LISTA indexing for the article, where they are identified as “author-supplied keywords.”

To discover the degree to which the keywords match frequently-occurring terms in the articles, we analyzed each text using Voyeur. Table 2 contains comparative data showing the keywords adjacent to the truncated term fre-quency maps for each article drawn from JDoc.

I think results in Table 2 are mixed. In most cases key-words from the title recur among the author-supplied keywords as well as among the most frequently-occurring terms. But there are some cases in which there is less cor-respondence. For example, Pattuelli and Rubinow’s paper has the terms “knowledge organization” and “case study” in its title, and neither term appears on either list. “Se-mantic web” occurs among the author keywords but is not among the most frequently-occurring terms (accord-ing to our analysis the word “semantic” does occur, but with very low frequency). Matthew’s paper title features “fixation” and “accretion” but neither word occurs among the keywords or the frequently-occurring terms. “Open access” is an important term in the title and key-words of the paper by Spezi et al. but is not among the most frequently-occurring terms. Another observation is that a number of frequently-occurring terms do not ap-pear in either the title or among the keywords. Examples of this are “users” and “analytic” in Goodale and Clough, “Deleuze” in Faucher, and “factors” and “needs” in Rob-son and Robinson.

Table 3 shows similar results from JASIST: Results are similarly mixed. Klavans et al., Lindenthal

and Losee list keywords “collaboration,” “trademarks” and “probabilistic” respectively, none of which occurs in either the title or the term list. Eschenfelder and Johnson name a “data commons” and use the words “scholarly” and “sharing” in their title, but none of those is directly indicated among the keywords or in the term list. Simi-larly, White’s “belief dynamics,” O’Brien and Lebow’s “news interactions,” Losee’s “document ordering,” and Velden’s “ethnographic observations”—all title words—are concepts that do not recur in either the keywords or the term lists.

In all of the cases from either journal where we see some specific divergence it could be asserted that the specific terms to which I’ve drawn attention are sub-sumed under terms representing hierarchically broader concepts. Traditionally, however, acknowledging hierar-chical relations has been the province of controlled vo-cabularies, and not of keyword searches. In every case, 7 from JASIST and 6 from JDoc, we have examples where terms that could be said to denote “keyness” as one po-tential measure, or increased specificity as another, are used in titles but not in the indexing. The inconsistency, if we want to consider it that, or alternatively, the failure

of precision to co-occur across the indexing occurs in roughly a third of the potential instances among these journal articles.

Collectively the results tell us that the correspondence between title keywords, terms frequently occurring in texts (which are actual keywords), and keywords supplied as indexing is incomplete although not dramatically so. The real hazard for retrieval is that quite precise terms that occur in papers are not being used in the indexing.

For the moment it seems clear that keywords, if used with journal articles, are good editorial practice only when they represent either keyness or specificity or both. Thus it seems the most appropriate editorial stance con-tinues to be edited lists. This will remain our editorial pol-icy through 2015. References Gross, Tina, Arlene G. Taylor and Daniel N. Joudrey.

2015. “Still a Lot to Lose: The Role of Controlled Vo-cabulary in Keyword Searching.” Cataloging & Classifica-tion Quarterly 53 no. 1: 1-39.

“Keywords.” 2015. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Keywords Accessed 23 February 2015.

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2014. “Keywords, Indexing, Text Analysis—An Editorial.” Knowledge Organization 40: 155-59.



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Issues Authors Titles Keywords Most frequently used terms

70n6, 2014

Goodale and Clough

Cognitive styles within an exploratory search system for digital librar-ies

Attitudes, Digital libraries, Individual differ-ences, Cognitive style, Information behav-iour, Educational informatics

users, analytic, wholist, paths, cognitive, style, task, search, path, information

70n5, 2014

Matthews Knowledge fixation andaccretion: longitudinal analysis of a social question-answering site

Communities, Individual behaviour, Knowl-edge processes, CQA, Q&A

Answer(s), question(s), quality, time, community, new, information, knowl-edge

70n4, 2014

Faucher An information meta-state approach to documentation

Information theory, Becoming, Metastability, Transduction, Sense

information, document, process, systems, Deleuze, way, new, documentation, terms, view

70n3, 2014

White, Willis and Greenberg

HIVEing: the effect of a semantic web tech-nology on inter-indexer consistency

Inter-indexer consistency, Indexing, Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE)

indexing, terms, hive, rele-vant, consistency, inter-indexer, marked, results, keywords, vocabularies

70n2, 2014

Finnemann Research libraries and the internet : On the transformative dynamic between institutions and digital media

Digitization, Research libraries, Digital me-dia, Knowledge production Paper type Re-search paper

media, digital, new, internet, knowledge, research, librar-ies, institutions, computer, materials

70n1, 2014

Alexander Devising a framework for assessing the subjec-tivity and objectivity of information taxonomy projects

Subjectivity, Classification, Information sci-ence, Taxonomies, Knowledge organisation, Sociology of science, Epistemology, Organ-isational politics, Organisational culture

projects, taxonomy, project, criticism, public, e.g, or-ganisation, process, frame-work, criteria

69n1, 2013

Bawden Knowledge, documen-tation and a London lo-cation

United Kingdom, Knowledge management London, account, Blooms-bury, library, Ashton, book, intellectual, British, history, information

69n1, 2013

Robson and Robinson

Building on models of information behaviour: linking information seeking and communi-cation

Information behaviour, Communications, Theory, Models, Information

information, model, behav-iour, seeking, models, com-munication, factors, figure, needs, sources

69n3, 2013

Spezi, Fry, Creaser, Probets and White

Researchers' green open access practice: a cross‐disciplinary analysis

Open access, Repositories, Self‐archiving, Behaviour, Attitudes, PEER project, Disci-plinary differences, Research work

sciences, researchers, ver-sion, article, likely, research, journal, repository, respon-dents, articles

69n4, 2013

Lingard Information, truth and meaning: a response to Budd's prolegomena

Information, Sense‐making, Critical real-ism, Ontology, Information‐seeking be-haviour, Abduction, Meaning‐making, Case studies, Philosophical concepts

information, truth, mean-ing, properties, sense-making, Budd(’s), defini-tion, action, human

69n5, 2013

Gobinda Sustainability of digital information services

Sustainable development, Digital informa-tion services, Sustainability, Social sustain-ability, Economic sustainability, Environ-mental sustainability

information, digital, sus-tainability, services, re-search, social, access, eco-nomic, sustainable, use

69n6, 2013

Pattuelli and Rubinow

The knowledge organi-zation of DBpedia: a case study

DBpedia, Linked open data, Semantic web Dbpedia, data, Wikipedia, properties, infobox, knowl-edge, ontology, jazz, tem-plates

Table 2. Journal of Documentation 2013-2014 keywords and most frequently-occurring terms.



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Issues Authors Titles Keywords Most frequently used terms 65n1, 2014

Klavans, LaPlante and Gol-beck

Subject matter categorization of tags applied to digital images from art museums

collaboration; museums tags, images, image, search, terms, tag, collection, subject, art, users

65n2, 2014

Björk, Laakso, Welling and Paetau

Anatomy of green open access - oa, green, articles, copies, reposito-ries, al, article, et, authors, institu-tional

65n3, 2014

Waltman and Costas F1000 Recommendations as a Potential New Data Source for Research Evaluation: A Com-parison With Citations

citation analysis publications, recommendations, cita-tions, publication, recommendation, number, citation, cited, score

65n4, 2014

Larivière, Lozano and Gin-gras

Are elite journals declining? bibliometrics papers, journals, top, journal, pro-portion, elite, citations, most-cited, published, nature

65n5, 2014

Lindenthal Valuable Words: The Price Dynamics of Inter-net Domain Names

trademarks; intellectual prop-erty; Internet

domain, domains, tld, prices, names, price, sales, market, com

65n6, 2014

Kinley, Tjondronegoro, Par-tridge and Edwards

Modeling users' web search behavior and their cognitive styles

end user searching; informa-tion seeking; human com-puter interaction

repositories, repository, opendoar, oa, number, data, growth, december, content, countries

65n7, 2014

Harvey and Harvey Privacy and security issues for mobile health platforms

mobile communications, pri-vacy, computer crime

security, data, health, mobile, infor-mation, services, devices, privacy, use, web

65n8, 2014

Mak Archaeology of a digitization History Eebo, books, digital, digitizations, STC, history, database, English, power, particular

65n9, 2014

Eschenfelder and Johnson Managing the Data Commons: Controlled Shar-ing of Scholarly Data

data, information access, digi-tal rights management

data, use, access, repositories, reposi-tory, controls, control, required, de-positors

65n10, 2014

Bergman, Whittaker and Falk

Shared files: The retrieval perspective document management, document retrieval

files, retrieval, file, participants, shar-ing, retrievals, folders

65n11, 2014

White Belief dynamics in web search user studies, information seeking

search, yes, beliefs, answer, results, participants, belief, answers, ques-tions, result

65n12, 2014

Pinfield, Salter, Bath, Hub-bard, Millington, Anders and Hussain

Open-Access Repositories Worldwide, 2005–2012: Past Growth, Current Characteristics, and Future Possibilities

scholarly communication, dif-fusion of innovation, open access publications

repositories, repository, opendoar, number, growth, data, december, content, countries

64n1, 2013

Huang and Soergel Relevance: An Improved Framework for Expli-cating the Notion

relevance, aboutness relevance, information, user, topical, systems, topic, need, matching, framework, users

64n2, 2013

Chen, Hu, Milbank and Schultz

A visual analytic study of retracted articles in sci-entific literature

content analysis, visualization (electronic), information fil-tering

retracted, articles, article, retraction, citation, cited, al, et, scientific, cita-tions

64n3, 2013

Frandsen and Nicolaisen The ripple effect: Citation chain reactions of a nobel prize

bibliometrics Nobel, publications, citation, prize, scientific, references, citations, dif-ference, r-squared, Aumann

64n4, 2013

Sugimoto and Thelwall Scholars on soap boxes: Science communication and dissemination in TED videos

video communications, schol-arly communication, we-bometrics

TED, videos, YouTube, science, cita-tions, online, metrics, talks, video, comments,

64n5, 2013

Mirel, Tonks, Song, Meng, Xuan and Ameziane

Studying PubMed usages in the field for com-plex problem solving: Implications for tool de-sign

information seeking, end user searching, qualitative research

users, information, results, pair, query, relevance, disease, research, PubMed, knowledge

64n6, 2013

Wainer and Valle What happens to computer science research af-ter it is published? Tracking CS research lines

bibliometrics, computer sci-ence, quantitative research

papers, conference, journal, confer-ences, originals, journals, research, published, authors, paper

64n7, 2013

Nicholas, Clark, Rowlands and Jamali

Information on the go: A case study of Euro-peana mobile users

usage studies, web usage stud-ies, user behavior

mobile, users, Europeana, informa-tion, page, use, content, search, be-havior, fixed

64n8, 2013

O'Brien and Lebow Mixed-methods approach to measuring user ex-perience in online news interactions

text mining, content filtering, automatic classification

news, time, information, partici-pants, measures, physiological

64n9, 2013

Boyack, Small and Klavans Improving the accuracy of co-citation clustering using full text

citation analysis, citation net-works, full text databases

co-citation, text, references, refer-ence, cluster, proximity, using, arti-cle, coherence, weighting

64n10, 2013

Rosemblat, Resnick, Aus-ton, Shin, Sneiderman, Fizsman and Rindflesch

Extending SemRep to the public health domain natural language processing, knowledge representation, semantic analysis

semantic, health, concepts, UMLS, new, domain, SemRep, public, rela-tions, types

64n11, 2013

Losee The effect of assigning a metadata or indexing term on document ordering

probabilistic indexing, per-formance, metadata

documents, term, document, rele-vant, metadata, terms, indexing, per-formance

64n12, 2013

Velden, Carl Lagoze The extraction of community structures from publication networks to support ethnographic observations of field differences in scientific communication

network analysis, qualitative research, scholarly communi-cation

field, research, network, topic, area, areas, chemistry, groups, collabora-tion, group

Table 3. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology keywords and most frequently-occurring terms


D. P. Madalli, B. P. Balaji, A. K. Sarangi. Faceted Ontological Representation for a Music Domain

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Faceted Ontological Representation for a Music Domain†

Dr. Devika P. Madalli*, B. Preedip Balaji**, Amit Kumar Sarangi***

*Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC) Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Bangalore 560 059, India, <[email protected]>

**Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore City Campus, No. 197/36 2nd Main Road, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore, 560 080, India <[email protected]>

***ICT Doctoral School, Via Sommarive, 9 I-38123 Povo, University of Trento, Trento, <[email protected]>

Devika P. Madalli is an associate professor of the DRTC, Indian Statistical Institute, India, and Adjunct faculty, DISI, University of Trento, Italy. She has contributed to UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP). She is on the advisory board of Universal Decimal Classification and a co-chair of the interest group on Agricul-tural Data at the Research Data Alliance. She has participated in EU funded projects including LivingKnowl-edge, AgInfra and worked as consultant to UNESCO and UNFAO. Dr. Madalli’s interest is in the area of knowledge organization and application of facetization in information systems, information infrastructures, digital libraries, semantic web technologies, faceted ontologies, and multilingual information services.

Preedip Balaji is currently an associate librarian at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, In-dia. He holds a masters degree in library and information science and was associated with the DRTC, Indian Statistical Institute as a senior research fellow. His research interests lie in the semantic web, digital libraries and knowledge organization.

Amit Kumar Sarangi is an ICT doctoral student at the University of Trento, Italy since November 2013. He completed his MS in library and information science from DRTC (Indian Statistical Institute). As a part of his PhD thesis, he is currently working towards building data models as well as developing vocabulary for knowl-edge representation of bibliographic entities. His research interests also include knowledge organization for the bibliographic universe.

Madalli, Devika P., Balaji, B. Preedip, and Sarangi, Amit Kumar. Faceted Ontological Representation for a Music Domain. Knowledge Organization. 42(1), 8-24. 45 references. Abstract: This paper proposes an analysis of faceted theory and of various knowledge organization ap-proaches. Building upon the faceted theory of S.R. Ranganathan (1967), the paper intends to address the fac-eted classification approach applied to build domain ontologies. Based on this perspective, an ontology of a music domain has been analyzed that would serve as a case study. As classificatory ontologies are employed to represent the relationships of entities and objects on the web, the faceted approach is deemed as an effective means to help organize web content. While different knowledge organization systems are being employed to address the cluttered Web in different contexts and with various degrees of effectiveness, faceted ontologies have an enormous potential for addressing this issue by performing domain analysis for knowledge modeling and ultimately facilitating semantic information retrieval.

† We are thankful to Dr. Biswanath Dutta who gave suggestions to improve this paper. We are extremely grateful to Prof. M. Cristina Pattuelli for her insightful comments and corrections, which helped to revise this paper.

Received: 20 October 2014; Revised: 7 February 2015; Accepted: 12 February 2015.

Keywords: facets, faceted, knowledge, domain, music, ontologies, classification, canons



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1.0 Introduction Classification is the process of grouping any abstract enti-ties or objects and is an intrinsic trait of humans that de-veloped from immemorial times. Aristotle’s classical theory of categories, based on a taxonomical approach, was the first codified knowledge representation system. It lasted for millennia and it was only in the mid-1950s that it was chal-lenged beginning with Wittgenstein and his theory of lan-guage games (Wittgenstein 1953) and new forms of knowledge organization systems (KOS) started to emerge (Taylor 2004). Our modern perception of knowledge is that the notion of knowledge is a continuum having multi-faceted disparities. In the early 20th century various thinkers from philosophy and library science drew up schemes and knowledge systems, which largely influenced the mapping of the universe of subjects. Later, the birth of Internet with its scattered, unorganized resources presented the biggest challenge ever for knowledge organization (Hong 2006).

Conventionally, knowledge has been represented with classification schemes, but socio-cognitive views have widely influenced knowledge representation models. Com-pound and complex subjects pose several challenges to classification for differentiation and hierarchical organiza-tion. Epistemological foundations set the stage for onto-logical inquiry and classificatory ontologies for knowledge representation models. The need for semantic-based sys-tems arose to influence machine-discernable, contextual and meaningful information retrieval for the web. More-over, as the paramount task of organizing the knowledge on the web gathers momentum, the emergence of data modeling and knowledge engineering techniques are over-arching. Some of the major knowledge organization ap-proaches are described below and Figure 1 portrays major KOS in the order for a music domain—UDC Classifica-tion, an Art & Architecture Thesaurus entry for music, the On-tology of Music Work and Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Figure 1. Example of KOS Approaches



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In this paper we present a principled approach to ana-lyzing music as a domain and explain the resulting con-cept scheme which is arranged by facets at a higher level of abstraction with each facet consisting of concepts with shared features with increasing intension of scope in the hierarchies. Such an exercise leads to the development of faceted ontologies, which is further discussed in sec-tion 2.0 below. 1.1 Major approaches of knowledge organization systems From a historical perspective, the field of knowledge or-ganization can be broadly divided into three approaches that correspond to three historical phases. Since the dawn of modern society, knowledge organization has been re-flected upon these foundational approaches adapted to represent and control the universe of knowledge. 1.1.1 Classification Approach Aristotle organized the universe of knowledge dividing it into ten main classes in order to:

Unambiguously classify all the phenomena by their essential true qualities, and Francis Bacon looked at empirical scientific methods to divide primary knowledge into divisions and its subdivisions. Ba-con distinguished between sacred theology revealed to man by God and human knowledge acquired by man’s unaided powers wherein the human knowl-edge was subdivided into history, poesy and phi-losophy.

according to Wallace (2007). These classical systems provided the foundations for

knowledge organization that lasted until the mid-twentieth century (Taylor 2004). In the field of librarian-ship a highly influential system of bibliographic knowl-edge organization was devised by Melvil Dewey in 1876. The universe of knowledge was represented in decimal notational system, where all the syntactical and semantic relations of classes and divisions of subjects are classified to incorporate ever-evolving domains of subjects in an enumerated manner. Many other schools of thought fol-lowed this and various classification systems were devel-oped to organize resources in libraries including the Li-brary of Congress Classification, Universal Decimal Classi-fication, Bliss Bibliographic Classification, and Colon Classifica-tion. Pioneering a freely-faceted library classification sys-tem, S. R. Ranganathan in the early 20th century focused on subject formation modes, faceted classification and the renowned faceted theory (Ranganathan 1967).

1.1.2 Subject indexing approach As the standardized knowledge organization systems such as term lists, classification schemes, categories and relationship lists evolved, artificial subject indexing lan-guages were also formulated (Hodge 2000). Subject in-dexing languages used for formulating subject terms gen-erate topical terms in the process, therefore performing an act of classification to facilitate computerized search-ing in library catalogues and standalone databases (Bhat-tacharya 1982). As potential vocabulary aids in subject search, in order to computerize library operations, vari-ous subject indexing techniques were implemented in the computer era of the late 20th century to facilitate infor-mation retrieval. PREserved Context Indexing System (PRECIS), chain indexing, and Postulate-based Permuted Subject Indexing (POPSI) are some examples of subject indexing languages tested for automatic indexing (Austin 1974; Bhattacharya 1979; Aptagiri, Gopinath & Prasad 1995). The choice of the name of the subject of a document and the rendering of the name in the heading of the specific subject entry can be obtained by facet analy-sis based on postulates and principles according to Ran-ganathan (1967). It was later demonstrated by POPSI that “using facet analysis for subject heading does not amount to using class number” (Biswas 1998, 192). In-formation retrieval became of paramount importance compared to traditional library environments, because the Internet made classification free from the limitations of location, notation, and shelving, but highly dependent on the prospects of indexing for information retrieval. 1.1.3 Ontology approach Ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization (Gruber 1995). Maedche and Staab (2001) defined ontologies as “metadata schemas that pro-vide a controlled vocabulary of concepts of explicitly de-fined and machine processable semantics, describing shared and common domain theories helping people and machines to communicate concisely.” Ontologies help to represent the relational aspects of objects by attributes, re-lationships and how they are interconnected in a domain or generally. It can be said that ontology encapsulates the complete existence of an entity, its relations, and attributes within a domain by formal conceptualization and most importantly it facilitates reuse and sharing of ontologies among humans as well as machines (Fensel et al. 2007). Al-though knowledge representation techniques were used to explore and connect different knowledge objects, the analysis of semantics in specific domains is slowly taking off to reach the potentialities of a postulated semantic digital library. Semantic web services use models such as



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Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) and Web Ser-vices Description Language (WSDL), and protocols like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and data and Web ontology languages viz., RDF, OWL and SKOS etc. Basic data can be modeled with primitive features such as classes, properties and instances whereas other relationships viz., instance-of, subclass-of and subproperty-of allow struc-tured and property hierarchies generic for ontologies. An example of a music domain ontology expressing the classes might include instrument, release, and composition, properties are collaborated_with, composed_in, remix_of , and individuals are album, single, soundtrack (see http:// musicontology.com/). Hence, examining the evolutionary approaches in knowledge organization, a graphic represen-tation of the role of ontologies in relation to the other knowledge systems is shown in Figure 2 wherein each el-lipse represents the evolving nature of KOS from the core and the ontologies ellipse refers to the broader relationship it shares with other KOS. 2.0 Faceted ontologies for a semantic web We introduce the concept of principled approach to build-ing ontologies from theoretical classification and follow the method of facetization of domain to represent concept

and conceptual relationships that lead to faceted ontolo-gies. Faceted ontologies are deemed an effective means to create consistent and cohesive knowledge structures for data modeling and representation. They “systematically or-ganize domain knowledge, provide the facility to envisage a given set of concepts in different contexts and relations, and so enable different subject views as required by the us-ers” (Prasad 2008,455). As a great deal of research is fo-cusing on semantic-based web services, faceted ontologies serve as an effective means for organizing web-based knowledge. Faceted subject analysis allows classifying an object from multiple perspectives making the faceted ap-proach widely appreciated and adapted. Ontologies are needed to reach the desired degree of expressiveness and provide machine-readable properties which would describe web services at a sufficient level of granularity for interop-erability, crosswalking and contextuality (Fensel et al. 2007).

Faceted metadata are important for the creation of Web page interfaces more intuitive for the users. Faceted meta-data makes it easier to navigate a web of resources (Prasad 2007). Several usability tests have proved that users do not hover over the pages when they end up finding irrelevant results (Porter 2003). Implicit classificatory ontologies combined with faceted infrastructure would be helpful not only as knowledge organization systems but also for “rep-

Figure 2. Relationships between KOS. Overlapping ontologies ellipse represents the broader relationship and the sizes are given only for clarity.



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resenting such concept schemes in a machine-processable language that will help to realize the idea of concept-based retrieval instead of text-based searching, which is the main motto of the semantic web” (Prasad and Madalli 2008; Prasad and Madalli 2009, 225). Moreover, faceted ontolo-gies are empirically evidenced by Prieto-Diaz (2003) who extended faceted theory for ontologies with a domain analysis approach in a semi-automated way. Giunchiglia et al. (2009, 36) also extended the theory of facet by the no-menclature faceted lightweight ontology:

Where the labels of nodes are organized according to predefined patterns which capture different as-pects of meaning i.e., facets. Here each term and corresponding concept occurring in its node labels must correspond to a term and corresponding con-cept in the background knowledge, modeled as a faceted classification scheme.

Emphasising the need for exploratory search in the post-Internet era, Tunkelang (2009, vii) described the role of faceted search pivotal for the internet as “faceted classifica-tion addresses the weakness of earlier knowledge represen-tations—namely the rigidity of taxonomical schemes and the chaos of unstructured indexes ... faceted classification offers an approach to knowledge representation that is both faithful to its riches and practical for real-world use.” 3.0 Music domain analysis Music as a domain is vast in scope and divergent in terms of concepts and conceptual relations. Music thus poses a challenge for knowledge representation. According to Smiraglia (2001), musical works when considered as enti-ties for information retrieval constitute varying instantia-tions of abstract creations. More importantly Smiraglia comments that semiotic analysis of musical works indi-cates a variety of cultural and social roles. This is signifi-cant in the analysis of music, as the domain is subject to cultural, temporal, geographic and sociological factors and hence can be envisaged and visualized by one or a combination of perspectives. In his analysis of the do-main of music, Abrahamsen (2003, 146) argues that:

The overall domain of music will be treated as eve-rything that can be connected to…and as sets of related discourses and domains. Music may, of course, also be regarded as something belonging to other domains such as education (teaching music), philosophy (thinking about music in philosophical ways), business (selling music), information science (organizing and retrieving music, etc).

For the purpose of building an ontology, the music do-main has to be defined in such a way as to establish its extension and intension in terms starting from generic to specific levels. According to Tennis (2003), for domain analysis to work cumulatively, transferable definitions of domains have to be made explicit. Tennis puts forth the two axes of domain analysis; one the areas of modulation and second one as the degrees of specialization. These axes correspond to the generic level indicating the scope and specific level of a domain. Hjørland (2002) describes eleven approaches to domain analysis including among others historical studies, empirical user studies and do-cument and genre studies.

Classifying music is a challenging task as the music ac-tivities, repertories, and oeuvres transcend borders and create a conceptual framework for music faceted ontol-ogy requiring a deep analysis and domain expertise. Moreover, music genres are not always amenable to a clear-cut categorization. For instance, genres such as popular music are becoming progressively more fusional and integrated with other types of music. Terminology can be also misleading as, for example, the case of the term “glass” that can be a subject heading for the com-mon kitchen utensil as well as a music instrument be-cause a glass is used to produce and perform music (Li-brary of Congress 2010a). The Library of Congress (2010b) has recognized that:

Merely creating headings as they exist in the subject headings is not the best way, as the representation of musical works—forms, genres, types show complex-ity of the existing heading structure conflating genre/form terms with medium of performance and there are better means to use controlled vocabulary to promote discovery of musical works.

Prototypes of music digital libraries and catalogues have been developed that facilitate effective information re-trieval of music information. Novel web services rely on music information extraction and representation underly-ing music-content-based, music-context-based and user-context-based approaches that inform novel types of inter-faces, content-based search schemes and networked deliv-ery mechanisms (Schedl et al. 2011). Music resources are arranged differently according to various approaches and purposes. For example, the Library of Congress uses sub-ject, name, and title as three facets to navigate music re-sources under the performing arts domain (Library of Congress 2012). YouTube and Allmusic.com use genres for browsing music videos and to navigate musical content on their websites (see: http://www.youtube.com/music; http://www.allmusic.com/genres). The genres are shown in Table 1.



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YouTube’s Genres AllMusic’s Genres Alternative K-Pop Avant-

Garde Latin

Avant-Garde Latin Blues New Age

Blues Metal Children’s Pop/Rock Comedy/ Spoken

New Age Classical Rap

Country Pop Country Reggae

Easy Listening

Rhythm & Blues

Easy Listen-ing

Religious

Electronic Rap Electronic Rhythm & Blues

Folk Reggae Folk Stage & Screen

Holiday Religious Holiday Vocal

International Rock Interna-tional

Jazz Stage & Screen

Jazz

Vocal Latin New Age

Table 1. Music genres of YouTube and AllMusic

Musipedia is an open collaborative music search engine displaying an explicit faceted interface to search music by instruments—keyboards, piano, and microphone and music elements such as contour and rhythm. It also uses melody to search for tunes and musical themes (see: http://www.musipedia.org/). The underlying ontological structure of its interface is represented in Figure 3. 4.0 Faceted ontologies for music An attempt has been made to analyze faceted ontologies for the music domain. Faceted ontologies for music are elaborated with examples for this study as discussed in this section. A faceted system would allow for multiple ways of classifying an item, rather than the hierarchical approach of Dewey or indeed taxonomies (Coult 2010). Faceted ontologies are robust knowledge mechanisms wherein facets are described as clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties or characteristics of a class or specific subject. Compar-ing different classification schemes, Foskett (1982, 207-8) highlighted the hospitality of Colon Classification as hierar-

Figure 3. Ontological relationship model of Musipedia.org interface



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chical and expressive, accommodating different kinds of division and displaying them both in chain and array. In faceted classification “without any influence or inhibition by the existing schedules for classification, whatever fac-ets occur in a compound subject are all found out by the facet analysis of that subject” (Ranganathan 1967, 109). In Ranganathan’s idea plane of the classification theory, he noted, “isolates are any idea or idea-complex fit to form a component of subject, but not by itself fit to be a subject.” Music is the art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative com-position, through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre (American Heritage Dictionary 2011). As a systematic domain-specific ontology, the organization of music be-gins with distinguishing the relations such as theory (ele-ments: time, melody, harmony, tone, texture); themes (expressions: affection, sweetness, warmth); forms (asso-ciated with motions and notes: fugue, plainsong, canon, chant, madrigal); genres (country, classical and tradi-tional); persons (musician, flutist, conductor) which was devised by Leach (1976) in his musical thesaurus. Figure 4 shows a basic ontology of music as a process of audi-tory communication and Figure 5 illustrates music as a compound subject.

Determining the relationships is essential for building faceted ontologies both implicit and explicit and even as

they are embedded inherently between the entities of the main classes of the music domain. Among the many ongo-ing projects, Music Ontology (see http://musicontology. com/) described many relationships of music manifesta-tions and AllMusic.com has defined its relationships attrib-utes, as shown in the Figure 6. 5.0 Faceted theory of an idea plane for music Ranganathan (1967, 143) postulated faceted classification principles to determine the synthesis of subjects. His “idea plane” consists of canons at the very beginning of concep-tualization. This can be applied while analyzing domains to build a faceted ontology. Facet is a generic term used to denote any component—be it a basic subject or an iso-late—of a compound subject and also its respective ranked forms, terms and numbers. Characteristic is any attribute of any complex of attributes with reference to which the likeness or unlikeness of entities can be determined and at least two of them are unlike. For example, rhythm is a characteristic of music, but not the sound of the music, which is equally shared by all listeners. Class is a ranked group, if a set of things is divided into groups based on characteristics or attributes and those groups are ranked, then each ranked group is a class, examples are “The Arts – 7” in UDC and “Fine Arts – N” in Colon Classification.

Figure 4. Basic ontology of music

Figure 5. Music as a compound subject

Figure 6. Relationship attributes of a music record at AllMusic.com



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Array is the class derived from a universe on the basis of a single characteristic at any one step in the progress towards its complete assortment and arranged in the preferred se-quence. Chain is a sequence of classes made up of any given class and its universe (e.g., Universe of Knowledge → The Arts → Music → Music Theory → Elements of Music → Harmony). Entities constitute any existent, con-crete, or conceptual, which is a thing or an idea (e.g.: Mi-crophone, Dance music, Mesmerizing, Music catalogue). Attribute is any property or quality or quantitative measure of an entity, action or discipline (e.g., in Music Element, Kind, Form, Musical Work, Artist, and Label are the at-tributes). In the universe of subjects, isolate ideas germane are manifested through verbal and notation parts by con-cepts and artificial numbers respectively. Just as a diamond has many facets, so does any given subject, each represent-ing a different view, aspect or dimension, thus allowing all pertinent facets of an item to be represented in its classifi-cation (Stewart 2011). Identifying the relationships of enti-ties is an inherent task in working out the characteristics. Ontologies are used to find the explicit relationships among the entities in many ways. In that sense, in music: available_as, track_number, instance_of, related_to, simi-lar_to, derived_from, member_of, composed_in and so on are some examples. The idea plane comprises canons listed below and each canon has its sub-set of canons described with examples derived from music domain. 5.1 Canons for characteristics Canons for characteristics have four sub-categories which draw attention to distinguish the properties of the entity to be classified. Each of these canons is described with examples taken from music domain analysis: 5.1.1 Canon of Differentiation In the different kinds of music, the dance music can be differentiated, but the performance of dance music can-not be considered. Similarly, musical instruments can be categorized based on wind, string and air but not differ-entiated by possession, ownership, and performance. 5.1.2 Canon of relevance Relevance of the entity is utmost importance to ensure how relatable the entity to the purpose of facetization is. When music multimedia is taken into consideration, then sound recording, computer music, motion pictures can be characterized, rather than storage, brand, duration and quality. Similarly, persons associated with music can be composers, singers, performers and researchers rather than their lifestyle, background and talent.

5.1.3 Canon of ascertainability The characteristic in view should be definite and ascer-tainable. Persons associated with music can be ascer-tained with their date of birth, then their education, fam-ily and nationality attributes. In the same way for vocal music, sex and vocal performance are more ascertainable than the lyrics and instruments. 5.1.4 Canon of permanence As entities in the universe of subjects are protean, per-manence of the subject should be factored. For musical forms, dance music, dramatic music and religious music are permanent than by the categorization of musician and labels. Similarly, music bands can be categorized as concert bands, rock bands and jazz bands over the or-ganization, affiliation, and producing company. 5.2 Canons for succession of characteristics Characteristics being complex to distinguish the intrica-cies and fallacies, the postulates in succession of charac-teristics help to reduce the ambiguities of properties of item being faceted with the canons that follow. 5.2.1 Canon of concomitance A canon of concomitance emphasizes the need for dif-ferent criteria for deriving successive characteristics than dwelling upon attributes which would result in same ar-rays of classes, or of isolate ideas. For example if music researchers are to be classified, their area of specialization would be more relevant by ethnomusicologist, sociomusi-colgist and organologist than by instruments, since a mu-sic researcher could be an instrumentalist too. 5.2.2 Canon of relevant succession In achieving the succession of characteristics, relevance should be maintained. For music literature, language, form, kind, composer and time facets could be more re-levant for getting relevant succession. 5.2.3 Canon of consistent succession Adhering consistently with the associated scheme of cha-racteristics is essential as long as there is no change in the purpose of ontology creation. Hence, characteristics should be propounded to maintain the permanence, and their succession in application should be consistent. For music history, space and time give rise to consistent suc-cession, which are more general for any other domain as



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modifiers. For example in the query: “Use of tabla in Ra-jasthani classical music for thumri in 18th century,” cen-tury can be analyzed as:

Basic Subject: Music Personality: Classical music Matter: Tabla Energy: Thumri (it is type of rendition) Language Isolate: Rajasthani Space Isolate: Rajasthan Time Isolate: 18th Century

5.3 Canons for array 5.3.1 Canon of exhaustiveness The classes in the array of classes, and the ranked isolates in an array of ranked isolates should be totally exhaustive of their respective common immediate universe. In music,

although geographical influences have been wide, it has been limited to Western music comprising of classical and popular. But given the rising of fusional music kinds, the genres are conflated with variety of elements, for accom-modating international music and with geographical fla-vours like Afro-Jazz, and Chicago blues, etc (see Table 1 for genres). 5.3.2 Canon of exclusiveness In order to ensure exclusivity in the classes of array, classes should be derived from its immediate universe that no two classes of the array can overlap or have an entity in com-mon. An example of persons associated with music has been given in Figure 7. By performance, if we consider a musician as singer, pianist, accompanist and so on and the same can be further faceted (by instrument: pianist, harp-ist, accompanist) and (by number: soloist, troupe).

Figure 7. Facetizing exclusivity of persons associated with music



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5.3.3 Canon of helpful sequence When the subject in an array of classes evolved in a per- iod of time, then sequencing the time facets should be rendered in a logical sequence as it progresses. For exam-ple, if music history is considered, here the principle of “later-in-time” can be applied as good prehistoric, an-cient, Biblical, medieval, renaissance, Baroque, classical, romantic, 20th century, contemporary and 21st century as Wikipedia does (Wikipedia 2012). 5.3.4 Canon of consistent sequence In order to ensure the logical conformity for sequencing the common facets, different standards are used by dif-ferent classification schemas. In Dewey Decimal Classifica-tion (DDC), 22nd edition, Table 1 fulfills this with stan-dard subdivisions. Part D of the Colon Classification 7th edition serves the same purpose with the help of general subdivisions and common isolates.

For example, the analysis of this query: “Pitch in Car-natic music recording in Sanskrit at Chennai December Season, 2011” gets the notation “NR15;cMB:pR.4411’P 11-964 CAR” in the Colon Classification. The analysis of this subject takes the aid of common isolates and general devices as follows:

NR: Music basic subject cMB: Pitch—Common matter property isolate pR: Energy—Recording 15: Sanskrit—Language isolate 4411: Chennai—Space isolate P11: 2011—Time isolate 964: Winter season—Time speciator CAR: Carnatic Music as an alphabetical device

5.4 Canons for chain 5.4.1 Canon of decreasing extension This canon helps to obtain the broad entities in a domain into their break-down facets in the order of broad to nar-row subjects as the intension of concepts increases. In the case of classical music history, the ranked isolates de-creasing extension is shown in Table 2:

Music Traditional Folk Eastern Folk Indian Folk Baule, Vadu

Table 2. Canon of decreasing extension

Consider the following two chains taken from the same class “Instruments,” in the main class “Music.” Flute and piano belong to the ranked isolate “instruments,” but are not subordinate to each other which is why they can be differentiated as monophonic instruments that can play only one note at a time and polyphonic instruments which can play several notes at a time (See Table 3).

[by note]: instruments Monophonic Polyphonic

Flute Piano

Table 3. Canon of decreasing extension 5.4.2 Canon of modulation A chain of classes or of ranked isolates should comprise one class or one ranked isolate, as the case may be, of each and every order that lies between the orders of the first link and the last link of the chain. Here Ranganathan (1967, 176) discussed the difficulty of obscurity in subjects and the challenges posed by indeterminateness to derive class orders in any hierarchy. Table 4 shows the “sex of the voice” and the “quantity of the voice” modulating to con-nect the relevant characteristics and the sequence of the application of these characteristics. If any of the ranked isolates “one voice,” or “more than one voice,” were miss-ing this would make the faceting defective.

Vocal music For one voice

For child’s voice. For boy’s voiceFor woman’s voice

Soprano Mezzosoprano

Contralto

For man’s voice Tenor

Baritone

Bass

For more than one voice Choirs

Children’s choirs. Boys’ choirs

Women’s choirs Men’s choirs

Mixed choirs

Solos with chorus

Table 4. Canon of modulation



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5.5 Canons for filiatory sequence 5.5.1 Canon of subordinate classes The subordinate classes in a class in the chain as they oc-cur should be followed by their superordinate class im-mediately to ensure that they are not separated or among the classes by any other classes. Table 5 shows that by purpose music can be categorized as “background” or “foreground” but it can’t be subordinate to “media” facet. This example is adapted and modified from the il-lustration of Spiteri (2003).

Music

[By purpose] Background music (Level 1 division)

[By media] Film music (Level 2 division) Television music (Level 2 division)

Foreground music (Level 1 division) [By media]

Music shows (Level 2 division) Motion pictures (Level 2 division)

[By function] Entertainment Recreation

Table 5. An example of subordinate classes 5.5.2 Canon of coordinate classes In a class, coordinate classes should not be separated from each other by any classes other than their own sub-classes. From the example given in Table 5 it is clear that enter-tainment and recreation should not appear between the same classes as background music and foreground music because the former two classes show different characteris-tics by function than the application of the facet by media. Hence, only the classes formed by the media facet can be retained between background music and foreground music.

As shown above, through the application of principles and canons the domain of music is broken down into logi-cal divisions. This approach helps in evolving logical struc-tures that are used in constructing faceted ontologies. 6.0 Facetization of Music Ontology In building ontologies, Preito-Diaz (2003) points out that “a classification scheme must be able to express hierar-chical relationships as well as relationships created to re-late two or more concepts belonging to different hierar-chies. Hierarchical relationships are based on the princi-ple of subordination or inclusion and are typical in tax-onomy.” Taxonomies and hierarchical schemes are basi-

cally factual, declarative and enumerative. The semantics of the relationships between their entities remain largely implicit, preventing the possibility to perform complex deductive reasoning, including logical inferences. This could represent a limitation for scientific domains where non-intuitive relationships are required to support inte-gration of complex datasets. In this context, the explicit representation of complex relationships and the ability to perform inferences, the core principles of the Semantic Web, become particularly critical (Stewart 2011, 160). Fa-ceted ontologies are expected to yield a major fillip to bridge these gaps by mapping relationships and charac-teristics with their analytico-synthetic features.

In the instance of building a faceted ontology for mu-sic concepts, domain analysis helps to comprehend how music can be categorized by different characteristics. The process of facetizing the domain of music was deter-mined in line with facetization postulates. With the aid of knowledge organization systems the ad hoc scheme can be revised to obtain a validated ontology. For the purpose of this study, music ontology is developed with these top classes: theory, persons, instruments, kinds, forms and works shown in Table 6. [theory] [person] [instrument][kind] [form] [work] elements time harmony tonality : : themes reminiscing in love romantic :

artist rapper : : album My World 2.0 Femme

Fatale : :

air trumpet clarinet : : string guitar violin fiddle : :

classical Greek Baroque : : popular jazz cool : : :

binary ternary da capo : : paraphrase musical parody

first movement allegro presto vivace : : instrument symphonydance ballroom waltzes

Table 6. Generating facets of the top classes of music The faceted ontology model for music gives the relation-ships, which are domain-specific, and some of the attrib-utes are shown in Figure 8. The advantages offered by faceted ontologies lie in the ability to build bottom-up domain facets rather than the more common process of starting at the top and creating a priori categories, then slotting items, classifying the items themselves and pull-ing out their most essential and persistent characteristics of hierarchies into facets (Stewart 2011).

Once the background knowledge is constructed, the next step is to address the application of facets to the on-tology. An example is illustrated in Figure 9 for a docu-ment titled “Using Violin Music as Auditory Practice for People Rehabilitated from Aphasia in India.” In faceted



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ontology the more terms are employed, the more specific is the correspondence to the concept in each node. As a consequence, each term and corresponding concept occur-ring in its node labels must correspond to a term in the background knowledge (See Figure 11 adapted from Gi-unchiglia et al. 2009). 7.0 Faceted searching As faceted classification is essential for organizing the Web, faceted search is the key to display the organized knowledge on the user interface. Faceted searching is helpful to sort out the different items by their groups and

websites of a number of companies and institutions, from e-commerce to libraries, have increasingly adopted a faceted approach to their user interfaces (Lemieux 2009). As Broughton (2011) points out, in the past five decades research on “facet” or “faceted” has increased in the number of publications per keyword from 33 in 1960-1970 to 687 in 2000-2011. The keyword search “music” in the Stanford Library catalogue at http://searchworks. stanford.edu/ shows the faceted results navigable by fac-ets: access, format, author, publication year, topic, loca-tion, call number, organization as author, region, era, and language. Faceted search is incorporated with enterprise search products such as Endeca (see http://www.

Figure 8. An example of music faceted ontology



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oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/endeca/index. html), and Solr (see http://lucene.apache.org/solr/). There are some examples of search tools deployed to in-crease the usability of digital resources, using faceted func-tionalities. User studies have shown that faceted searching provides more effective information-seeking support to

users than conventional best first search. As Tunkelang (2009) highlights for faceted navigation, it is important to retain users on websites for resource discovery and value the numbers of clicks that lead to successful retrieval, and most importantly enable users to find what they are seek-ing.

Figure 9. Example of faceted ontology analysis



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7.1 Faceted query analysis An example of faceted query analysis is explained here. Faceted query analysis takes into account the entity, ac-tion, action of entity etc. For instance “Using Violin Mu-sic as Auditory Practice for People Rehabilitated from Aphasia in India,” is analyzed to identify the subject strings, followed by the mapping of domain knowledge wherein the properties and the relationships are explored and the subject of the query is analysed, as illustrated in Figure 10. Hence, the type of representation adapted would determine the result outcome, as the ontological representation would map different levels of relation-ships of documents, as illustrated in Figure 11.

When music can be modeled using the faceted meta-data, schema and faceted ontologies (Tzitzikas 2002; Corthaut et al. 2008; Elhadad et al. 2010; Smith and Shad-bolt 2012), their representation in standards like Dublin Core, FOAF and Simple Knowledge Organization System, can be explored as shown in Figure 12 adapted from Na-tional Library of Sweden’s blog (National Library of Swe-den 2008). As most of the present schematic ontologies, typically based on RDF/OWL/SKOS are subject repre-sentative, it requires extension of OWL or SKOS to incor-porate analytico-synthetic features of faceted classification (Prasad and Madalli 2009; Slavic and Cordeiro 2004). However a discussion on formalization and pros and cons of existing languages is deemed as out of scope of the dis-cussion here. 8.0 Conclusion This paper presented a faceted approach to domain mod-eling as a step in ontology building. This is an effective method to strengthen schematic knowledge representa-tion structures and the domain of music is presented as a

use case. Faceted ontologies provide a powerful tool for organizing web-based knowledge using classificatory principles that were traditionally used in knowledge or-ganization within libraries. The levels of expressivity and hospitability make it possible to combine terms in a fle-xible way and thus better represent semantically complex and/or compound subjects (Hong 2006). As the applica-tion of facet theory for organizing knowledge on web is gaining prominence, faceted ontologies have high poten-tial for evolving domain models into formalized ontolo-gies which could be more application-oriented for the re-al world. Vocabularies can be engineered with faceted on-tologies, which provide multiple ways of looking at the domain modeling and thus expression of ontologies would be universally acceptable. References Abrahamsen, Knut Tore. 2003. “Indexing of musical

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Figure 10. Query analysis of a music document



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Figure 11. Faceted query analysis



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B. I. Akhigbe, B. S. Afolabi, E. R. Adagunodo. Modelling User-Centered Attributes: The Web Search Engine as a Case

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Modelling User-Centered Attributes: The Web Search Engine as a Case†

Bernard Ijesunor Akhigbe*, Babajide Samuel Afolabi**, Emmanuel Rotimi Adagunodo***

*/**/***Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

*<biakhigbe@ oauife.edu.ng>, **<[email protected]>, *** <[email protected]>

Bernard Ijesunor Akhigbe is a Ph.D. student in computer science and a lecturer at the Department of Com-puter Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. Bernard holds B.Sc., M.Sc., and MPhil in computer science. He researches generally in Information system, with specific interest in the user aspect of evaluation in Information Retrieval. He has attended learned conferences both locally and internationally, and has published in scholarly journals. He is a member of Information Storage and Retrieval Group research team, ISKO France, and Nigeria Computer Society.

Babajide Samuel Afolabi is a Ph.D. holder and a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. He is currently the team leader of Information Storage And Retrieval Group research team. His research interest is in Information system, but with specialty in infor-mation storage and retrieval. He is a member of ISKO France, Nigeria Computer Society, and Computer Pro-fessionals of Nigeria. He has presented papers at several international conferences and so on. He has also pub-lished in a number of scholarly journals.

Emmanuel Rotimi Adagunodo holds a Ph.D. and he is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. His research interest is in information systems. He has attended and presented papers in international conferences and workshops (both locally and internationally). He has also published in a number of scholarly journals. He plays a lot of lead roles in research and develop-ment. He is a member of professional bodies such as Nigeria Computer Society, and Computer Professionals of Nigeria.

Akhigbe, Bernard Ijesunor, Afolabi, Babajide Samuel, and Adagunodo, Emmanuel Rotimi. Modelling User-Centered Attributes: The Web Search Engine as a Case. Knowledge Organization. 42(1), 25-39. 85 references. Abstract: This paper modeled user-centered attributes with which First and Second-order Measurement Mod-els (FSoMM) were proposed using factor analysis in a quantitative evaluative procedure. There was need to re-late users needs as requirements for Web Search Engines (WeSEs) in a dynamic context. This informed the motivation for formulating the FSoMM to possess baseline properties with reasonable validity and reliability. This was achieved by considering how users “seek out and use” information as useful characteristics that can suffice as users’ attributes. This is because of the belief in this paper that factors modelled from users’ attrib-utes encapsulate users’ needs. With the qualitative evaluative approach these factors were translated into users’ requirements for WeSEs’ development. Results obtained showed that both models demonstrated reasonable model fit. Therefore, users’ requirements can be communicated with measurement models. As illustrated in this paper, both the qualitative and quantitative evaluative approach remain an invaluable resource in this respect. We therefore infer that WeSEs’ success in the delivery of assistance to users, particularly in a dynamic context must be based, not only on the progress of tech-nology, but also on users’ requirements.

† Many people supported this research. Our thanks to all the authors of the literature reviewed for this paper. Thanks to the editors and reviewers who took their time to do a thorough job on the paper for it to be published. Finally, thanks to Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria for its research and financial support through TETfund grant.



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Received: 7 August 2014; Revised 21 November 2014; Accepted 21 December 2014

Keywords: users, information needs, user-centered, evaluative model 1.0 Introduction The practice of evaluating all kind of Information Sys-tems (ISs) can be difficult and confusing (Smithson 1994; Lagsten 2011). Today, this is been exacerbated by the pervasive, complex and interactive nature (Klecun and Cornford 2005; and Irani et al. 2005; as cited in Lagsten 2011) of Information Retrieval (IR) systems. All the same, evaluation is still an important topic for study in IS (Smithson 1994; Irani et al. 2005, as cited in Lagsten, 2011). The need for system appraisal, measurement of its success, and the recognition of its benefits (if any) (House 1980; Guba and Lincoln 1989, as cited in Stock-dale et al. 2008), and the continual changes the IR system regularly undergoes that affects their interfaces are some reasons to continue to evaluate them (Gordon and Pathak 1999). The Internet, though robust, is fluxing in nature (Langville and Meyer 2012) and constitutes the dynamic context of the modern IR system. This also contributes greatly to the overarching need to continu-ously evaluate the system.

IR systems are veritable tools for knowledge organiza-tion (Mandl 2008). This includes the capturing, organizing, refining and disseminating of information using tech-niques of cataloguing and indexing, retrieving, filtering, and ranking (Chowdhury 2004). The system is versatile (Anderson et al. 2000; Shiri and Revie 2006; Li et al. 2008; Srihari et al. 2008), and useful for sundry search on the Web (Zimmer 2010). Thus, both structured and un-structured information (Ferrucci and Lally 2004) are eas-ily accessed. The possibility for thesauri’s inclusion in IR interfaces (Shiri et al. 2002; Shiri and Revie 2006) has also contributed (no doubt) to making the IR system a power-ful interface for accessing the vast amounts of informa-tion available on the World Wide Web and beyond (Zim-mer 2010). Thesauri have been recognized as a useful source for enhancing search-term selection for query formulation and expansion (Shiri et al. 2002; Shiri and Revie 2006).

Worthy of note is the fact that as the Web constantly changes, the needs of users as requirements also change. It is important that these requirements are related in such a way that they do not become obsolete, since they can serve as basis for others to be determined. Usually they do include a summary description(s) of the tasks that the system should support and the function(s) which sup-ports them. These requirements may not evolve as the sy-stem is being developed. Formal user-centered evalua-

tions may be required to determine users’ needs as re-quirements at its formative stage (Maguire and Bevan 2002). But, at the summative stage of the system (like in the case of the WeSE under consideration in this paper), there will be need to adjust the system to suit specific or several purposes. When such system is in a dynamic envi-ronment as has been identified, evidently the needs of the users will change in the same proportion. The pa-rameters to determine users’ needs as requirements may not only change, they may go obsolete.

Following Coutaz et al.’s (2005) meaning of “context,” Akhigbe et al. (2014) related users’ needs to spaces de-signed to serve particular purposes. These researchers ex-tended this meaning by expressing it as a state of prede-fined environment with a fixed set of interaction re-sources. They also considered it as part of the process of interacting with an ever-changing environment that is composed of reconfigurable, migratory, distributed, and multiscale resources (Coutaz et al. 2005). This current paper extends this same meaning to formulate measure-ment models with baseline properties in the first and sec-ond (or advance) order. It is therefore hoped that with these models a better way of relating users’ needs as re-quirements is achieved. Consistent with e.g. Akhigbe et al. (2014), this current paper draws from the theory of measurement and constructivism to (i) be able to use us-ers’ attributes at the level of measurement, and (ii) intro-duce the concept of user-centricity to establish perform-ance criteria from users’ attributes. We believe users’ at-tributes can convey users’ needs, and from such needs users’ requirements can be related. The user-centered IS evaluative approach is therefore explored to propose a baseline model to communicate users’ needs as re-quirements of WeSEs. However, this paper is limited to the use of ordinal data from users’ system usage in rela-tion to user-system interactivity to model user-centered attributes. With the factor analysis (FA) technique users’ needs as requirements with design implications are pre-sented.

Though several works exist, and many methods have been developed over the years to evaluate IS, there is yet no unique model that evaluates all kind of ISs (Islam 2009). There is also no known measurement model – ex-cept the one presented by Akhigbe et al. (2014) that communicates users’ needs as requirements. This paper builds on the work of Akhigbe et al. (2014) to model us-ers’ attributes as users’ perceptions of WeSE. Thus, the possibility of modelling user-centered attributes is under-



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scored. On the other hand, since these attributes could encapsulate users’ needs (Akhigbe et al. 2014), we debate that they can be used to relate (or specify) users’ require-ments. The motivation for this is the belief that IS will do better, if users’ needs are identified, and are rightly ap-propriated. Therefore, this paper provides information on how to communicate users’ needs to developers of IR systems. Furthermore, the paper progresses thus. In Sec-tion 2 the state-of-the-art is offered. Section 3 contains the WeSE and its context, with the methodology and theoretical foundations in Section 4, and in Sections 5 and 6, the proposed models and conclusion are pre-sented. 2.0 Literature review Interestingly, there are several works in this area. For in-stance, their focus is on user-centered variables such as those relating to Information Needs (INs), user inten-tions, personal characteristics, different user information seeking profiles, and the investigation of their relation-ship to term selection in the search process (Shiri et al. 2002). Particularly, the work of Smithson (1994) reported a longitudinal study concerning the evaluation of IR sys-tems from within the context of User’s Information-seeking Behaviour (UIsB). It also argued in favour of the pursuance of a more user-centered (interpretive) ap-proach, like other proponents (Saracevic 1995; Dunlop 2000; Belkin 2008). Cognizant of this argument, this pa-per uses the user-centered evaluative paradigm to model user attributes. It moves a step further than that of Smithson (1994), by using the evaluative resource of User’s Information behaviour (UIB). Within this context, the previous experiences of users – information behav-iour, were harnessed with the belief that their knack for information search – UIsB were added to. We argue therefore that since users can construct knowledge, their evaluation of IR system will be invaluable. Like Smithson (1994) observed, the issue of user’s information search-ing is dynamic. Thus, it is not ideal to look at evaluating IR systems from the perspective of the users based on their initial knowledge of the problem domain and in-formation-seeking strategies alone. We believe that when-ever users successfully use the IR system, or even after using the system and they are unimpressed, their knowl-edge of the problem domain and information-seeking strategies still improves. This we believe is further influ-enced by the UIB.

User-centered research efforts that leverage on end-users thoughts with a view to engendering better IR sys-tems exists. The research efforts of Shiri and his col-leagues are a few examples worthy of note. These efforts include (i) a review of literature that focus on studies

which adopt a user-centered approach in a survey of methodologies and results from empirical studies on the use of thesauri as sources of term selection for query formulation and expansion during search process (Shiri and Revie 2006), (ii) the investigation of users’ thought processes, perceptions, and attitudes towards the identifi-cation of user requirements for developing a full-blown pilot terminology service (Shiri et al. 2004), and (iii) the study of end-user query-expansion behaviour within the context of a thesaurus-enhanced search setting on the Web (Shiri and Revie 2006). While the effort of Shiri et al. (2004) underscored the fact that end-users’ thought processes, perceptions, and attitudes can be harnessed for the evaluative good of ISs, the contributions of Shiri et al. (2002), and Shiri and Revie (2006) were toward a bet-ter user interface with thesauri facilities. However, this current paper differs from them based on (i) its theoret-ics, (ii) the data analytic technique with multivariate capa-bility that is explored, (iii) the modelling of users’ attrib-utes, (iv) the communication of users’ need(s) as re-quirements, and (v) the evaluative models presented. While usability formed the main theme in terms of the factor employed in Shiri et al. (2004), this current paper used multiple factors.

Evaluating performance remains a primary reason to evaluate IR systems (Smithson 1994). As a result, some earlier works (see Smithson 1994) showed considerable interest in this regard. Others works (e.g. Cheng et al. 2010; Lamm et al. 2010; van Schaik and Ling 2011; and Palanisamy 2013) – though quite recent, exist but did not examined system performance in terms of users’ needs, nor communicate them as users’ requirements in a dy-namic context.

For instance, Cheng et al. (2010) examined perform-ance in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and the learning effect of IR systems. This effort introduced system sup-port for non-expert users to improve search performance over series of search sessions. User expectations (UE) as a measure has been explored. In Lamm et al. (2010), UE was assessed in relation to user-satisfaction using a con-firmation and disconfirmation paradigm. In HCI, good “user experiences” are advocated with interactive systems during use. But, it is not yet clear the extent to which in-teraction experiences will lead to a successful IS product. van Schaik and Ling (2011) examined this in relation to technology acceptance. Performance was addressed with respect to “user experience” and equated to “interaction experience.” Judging by the current level of IR systems’ interactivity, subjective issues like user-satisfaction and user-system effectiveness need to be assessed. Palanisamy (2013) offered a conceptual model based on literature, with user satisfaction and usage as the success variable, and performance was characterized as “a good SE.” In



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addition, system performances were considered with re-spect to users’ experience and expectations, and user and system effectiveness in (e.g. Cheng et al. 2010; Lamm et al. 2010). But, none related them to communicate users’ needs (or as users’ requirements) for SEs development. Even, the dynamic nature of the Web context was ig-nored. In terms of context, our work is consistent with that of (e.g. Doll and Torkzadeh 1991 and Doll et al. 1994). In an end-user-computing environment (or con-text) like ours they measured user-satisfaction in a stand-alone data processing environment as specific application domain. But, ours differs as an interactive and dynamic context.

In IR, evaluative models are usually objective in nature, with a few that are subjective. This paper presents subjec-tive evaluative models that its formulation includes the reflective approach that draws from psychology and cog-nitive research. This is because of the need for a baseline model; a model that relates its constructs as users’ needs (or requirements). For instance, we require each con-structs (or factors) to communicate users’ needs as inde-pendently as possible. So, constructs’ relationships must be in tandem with other contributing constructs. The in-tention is to have auxiliary theories that bridge the gap between abstract theoretical constructs and measurable empirical phenomena (Edwards and Bagozzi 2000; Jan-sen and Rieh 2010). Thus, only relationships between theoretical constructs are specified. 3.0 Web search engine and the changing

environment The WeSE is one example of an IR system. Like others (see Akhigbe 2012 for other examples of IR systems), the SE is a type of IS (Akhigbe et al. 2013; Palanisamy 2013). The start of the Internet helped IR to become increas-ingly relevant and researched. Now, on a daily basis over 80% of Web users use WeSEs (Jansen and Spink 2006; Sujatha and Dhavachelvan 2011), hence its adoption among the other IR systems in this paper. Some of the challenges identified in IR evaluative research are (i) what it means for IR systems to be successful, (ii) how to in-vestigate users, their context, and (iii) how improved evaluations can be carried out.

Additionally, in IR, the scope of what is known as “sy-stem” includes elements of the retrieval context such as the user or the user’s environment, which are often ex-cluded in the evaluation of IR systems. Unlike the Sys-tem-Centered (SC) approach, the User-Centered (UC) method takes into account the user, his/her context and situation, how satisfied they are, and their interactions with IR systems (Bilal and Boehm 2013). The UC ap-proach has been developed to address a range of poorly

understood issues relating to behavioural and cognitive aspects of the IR process. This human method is con-cerned with studying and evaluating the ways in which users choose terms for formulating, expanding or modi-fying their queries during a search process. It deals with models and issues that are cognitive and behavioural in nature that can affect not only the selection of search terms by users, but other further interactions with the sy-stem (Shiri et al. 2002).

The Web is highly dynamic (Langville and Meyer 2012), and a matter of great interest is how much the re-sults of different SEs change over time. This gives a sense of how dynamic a search service is, either in its crawling policy, or through changes in its ranking compu-tation (Webber 2010). Basically, WeSEs offer four main facilities, which include Web page gathering, clustering, the provision of hyperlinks, and they also allow users to issue queries. The benefits of these facilities range from users’ ability to retrieve information, ability to connect Web pages, employ information retrieval algorithms to find the most relevant Web pages, to finding resources on the World Wide Web. Thus, the effective use of SEs for IR is a crucial challenge for any Internet user (Gordon and Pathak 1999; Liaw and Huang 2006). For WeSEs in particular, several studies exist based on the SC approach that investigate the usage or effectiveness of Web interac-tion on users’ search for information. On the contrary, only few studies adopt the user-focused approach to eva-luate the effects of SEs on individual information re-trieval (e.g. Liaw and Huang 2003; Spink 2002, and Liaw and Huang 2006). Unfortunately, the SC methodology has remained dominant (Akhigbe et al. 2014), even though it can no longer cope with the challenge of evalu-ating the modern IR systems. This is due to their very in-teractive nature (Saracevic 1995; Dunlop 2000; Akhigbe et al. 2014). Exacerbating this is the fact that available works are mostly objective, thus gaps exists that require subjective approach (Clough and Sanderson 2013) to fill them up with respect to IR system evaluation.

The understanding of end-users’ behavioural and co-gnitive attitudes toward SEs still remain a critical issue that cannot be overlooked (Liaw and Huang 2006). In Liaw and Huang’s (2006) study this was pursued, and us-ers’ IR behaviours were investigated. The effort corrobo-rates the understanding that users’ SE experiences as at-tributes could be explored to understand their attitudes toward SEs. These experiences are harnessed as attributes in this paper to satisfy its goal. 3.1 Modelling user-centered attribute People seek out and use information constantly as part of their daily life. This information often relates to work,



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leisure, health, money, and family. Additionally, a host of other topics can also be sought from a huge range of sources on the Internet using the WeSE (Johnstone et al. 2004). How users “seek out and use” information is be-lieved in this paper to contain some form of characteris-tics that can be used to assess IS, with a bid to improving them. This is because users’ requirements are believed to be locked up in such attitudes or form of characteristics. For instance, many studies in decision making, marketing and informatics have shown that people apply a rich con-text when seeking for information, making decisions, and forming opinions (Johnstone et al. 2004). This means that users construct sense and meaning that is appropri-ate to their context from the systems available to them from where they source information (Dervin and Nilan 1986, as cited in Johnstone et al. 2004). We therefore ar-gue that how (or the way) users interact with information and their sources can be studied for evaluative purposes.

From the information processing theoretic view, the user-centered view of evaluation examines the roles hu-mans play in translating received information into action. This may include judgement calls such as: Do I act on it? ... Ignore it? ... Pass it on? (Johnstone et al. 2004). As a re-sult, users may develop behavioural habits when interact-ing with information that could either support or inhibit both the individual or organizational efficiency and effec-tiveness. These “rich evaluative resources” have been largely ignored by IS researchers (Johnstone et al. 2004). There is need to study the way people interact with digital information, which although requires a fundamentally different paradigm should not be neglected (Dervin and Nilan 1986, as cited in Johnstone et al. 2004). For such study, one question to ask is, what people do with the in-formation they retrieve? The many options open to them may be human, process and context specific. Users may use them to update previous information, or they may store it, discard it, pass it on to someone else, combine it with other information, embed it in a report, and so on. These observable actions are collectively referred to as Human Information Behaviour (HIB). They form part of the overall phenomenon of human information proc-essing. The totality of human information processing in-clude internal cognitive processes, which do not necessar-ily result in observable behaviour.

Cognizance of this, we use the definition of some of HIB’s proponents (e.g. Taylor 1991, and Davenport 1997, as cited in Johnstone et al. 2004) to influence user-centered attribute modelling. First, Taylor defined HIB as “the sum of activities through which information be-comes useful.” This view underscores the fact that an in-dividual’s information behaviour is dependent upon the type of person, the problem being resolved, the setting (of both people and problem) and what constitutes reso-

lution of the problem. Secondly, for Davenport HIB has to do with “how individuals approach and handle infor-mation.” This includes searching for it, using it, modify-ing it, sharing it, hoarding it, and even ignoring it. Conse-quently, when we manage information behaviour, we’re attempting to improve the overall effectiveness of an or-ganization’s information environment through concerted action.

As earlier argued the traditional SC methodology can-not be used to realize this, hence the need to mature the alternate user-centered methodology for IS albeit for IR evaluative research. With this approach, this paper pro-poses that the “rich evaluative resources” or salient user-attributes in users’ information behaviour can be har-nessed for IS evaluative gain.

Therefore following the precepts of Johnstone et al. (2004), we also contend that a user-centered research paradigm that is constructivist among others can be used to study the process by which people interact with the in-formation in their environment. To put this contention in proper perspective the Content, Context, and Process (CCP) framework is adapted. The CCP was used by Pet-tigrew (1985) and Symons (1991) to develop a parsimo-nious framework for building specific IS evaluation mod-els. Its relevance in this paper is that its approach to eva-luation allows for questions of what is being measured (Content), by whom and for what purpose (Context), to be asked. Additionally, guidance on the process of evaluation requires information to explain the how it will be undertaken (Symons 1991). Thus, the CCP’s frame-work is extended in this paper to introduce both the measurement and the constructivist theoretics in the modelling of user-centered attributes or IS evaluation.

In order to properly integrate the CCP framework to model intended user-centered attributes in this paper, this paper draws from the two strongly identifiable themes that the IS evaluation literature has followed over time. The themes include (i) the development of evaluative models to measure identifiable constructs base on system use, and (ii) at a meta-level, the discussions on the para-digms that should be used to approach the evaluation process (Stockdale et al. 2008). Following (e.g. Stockdale et al. 2008) as inspired by (e.g. Pettigrew 1985, and Sy-mons 1991, as cited in Stockdale et al. 2008), we use the CCP’s framework rich vein of work to leverage the mod-elling of user-centered attributes in this paper. So, while Content and Context are used to capture the first theme, the second theme is captured within the Process part of the framework. This is because placed within an interpre-tive (or constructivist) paradigm as advocated in this re-search and by many IS evaluation researchers (Stockdale et al. 2008), a wide range of factors that need to be taken into account in an effective evaluation were easily recog-



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nized. For Stockdale et al. (2008), these factors are inter-linked and cannot be considered in isolation. Therefore, how the evaluation is to be carried out and when the pro-cess should take place must be closely informed by what is being evaluated (the content). Additionally, the differ-ent perceptions of stakeholders must be included. In our opinion, since the proper identification of the stake-holders in an evaluation process is also important and it answers the question of the “who” perspective of the CCP framework, the purpose for the evaluation (the con-text) would hopefully be positively influenced. For more details of the CCP framework, its elaboration can be found in Stockdale et al. (2008). 4.0 Methodology Here, we introduce the concept of user-centricity, the theoretical foundation, issues of scale development, data collection, data analysis and result, and sample profile as they apply in this paper. 4.1 The concept of user-centricity The concept of user-centricity and its attendant method-ology are the sine qua non of any science that models us-ers’ judgment of systems (Kelly 2009). This concept sug-gests the provision of the possibility of (evaluative re-searchers) being able to “step inside the head of the user” (Hotchkiss 2007). Thus, evaluating IS from this perspective could yield results that will assist stakeholders in toggling the perspective of users of a system (espe-cially what motivates them to use the system) on and off. As a result, users’ personas can be adapted as design ve-hicle (Hotchkiss 2007) to perfect the development of sys-tems.

The end-result of using the concept can be used to as-sist stakeholders to stay on track and remain in the mind-set of the user during system design. In a nutshell this means treating the user as king, and making everything (deign-implementation-evaluation, and re-design if need-ful) revolve round the user. In all the sense of it, the user being king hypothetically connotes building everything about a system around the user. This is very important in order to deliver the best possible end-user experiences that are defined in users’ own terms. This is far from the “corporate feel good thing,” but from the “user feel good” perspective (Hotchkiss 2007). Like Patton (2007) puts it, in the absence of a strong mental model of spe-cific users, we self-substitute. Self-substitution isn’t user-centric – it’s self-centric. Therefore, expressing concern for users without understanding them, leads to self-centric evaluation.” With this concept, this paper uses the theoretical foundations described in Section 4.2 to influ-

ence the modelling of the attributes of users. This is to-wards the development of a baseline Second-order Measurement Model (SoMM) for IR system evaluation. The SoMM (see Figure 2) is an extension of the First-order Measurement Model (FoMM) (see Figure 1) pro-posed in Akhigbe et al. (2014). The motivation for the SoMM is stemmed from the desire for a more valid and reliable user-centric evaluative model. 4.2 Theoretical foundations The theory of measurement suggests the use of multiple-items to measure constructs; thus providing sufficient theoretical grounding to avoid the use of single-items (Furr and Bacharach 2007; Viswanathan 2005, as cited by Kelly 2009). It supports response reliability and validity, and allows studies (like this one) to move evaluative exer-cise from being “monolithic to pluralist notions” (Baba-heidari 2009). Notions are a representation of subjects’ normal experiences from system use. This was modelled using users “judgments,” and only users of any three WebSE formed the sample stratified for the study. This was necessary to recognize every subjects’ previous search experiences and search norms.

Based on the goal of this paper, the Measurement Theory (MT) is axiomatically presented using mathemati-cal operations. These operations draw from the represen-tational, classical as well as the conjoint view of the the-ory of measurement. Their adoption is based on the fact that the views (see Trendler 2009) underscore the meas-urement theoretics. This is because they concur with the understanding that measurability is empirical. That is the attribute involved in measurement are really quantitative (Trendler 2009). Cognizant of this, the constituents of an Empirical Relational System (ERS) is adapted to interpret the MT since it has its roots in the theory of models as developed by (Tarski 1954, as cited in Trendler 2009).

The MT when conceptualized as an ERS can be for-mally specified as a finite set of elements called the do-main of the relational system say A , and relations be-tween the elements (Trendler 2009). For-mally 1 1( , , ..., , , ..., )n mA A R R O O ;

Where A is an ordered tuple, such that;

;1,..., ;

1,..., .i

j

A a nonempty set of objectsR i set of relations on A i n andO closed binary operations j m

Following the MT concept of (e.g. Michell 1990 and 1997, as cited in Trendler 2009; Briand et al. 1996, and Ishikawa 2007, 2006) we define measurement as being a



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homomorphism (see Ishikawa 2006; and Trendler 2009 and other related works) between empirical and numeri-cal structures. This allowed us to interpret the ERS as a relational system. This is such that the elements are as-sumed as magnitudes of a quantity and the relations be-tween the elements are relations between magnitudes. This is important for us to obtain the expected a quanti-tative structure. Thus, equal levels of “some manifest variable” that necessarily correspond to equal levels of “some latent variable” are not taken for granted (Trendler 2009). Consistent with what is suggested in Trendler (2009), there is need for this to be ascertained by an ex-periment, which is described and its result presented in this paper. Based on these theoretics, it was therefore possible to use MT’s suggestion that the use of multiple items (observables) to measure attributes (unobservables) are better than the use of single items (Kelly 2009). Readers can consult (e.g. Furr and Bacharach 2007; Viswanathan 2005; Kelly 2009) for details on this.

Basically, constructivism is the belief in pluralistic, in-terpretive, open-ended, and contextualized perspectives toward reality. It includes notions of aspects that; (i) there is a real world that sets boundaries (or context) to what we can experience, and (ii) reality is local and there are multiple realities or pluralistic perspective (Creswell and Miller 2000). For instance, users’ experiences are active processes in which users’ actively construct ideas (or con-cepts) based upon their “current or past knowledge” of system use. Additionally, of the cognitive and social views of constructivism (Talja et al. 2005), we adopt the cogni-tive view. This is because we believe that individuals cre-ate knowledge structures and mental models through their interactive experiences with (and observation of) the system during use. Unlike social constructivism, Cogni-tive Constructivism (Cog-C) lay major emphasis on the way in which knowledge is actively built up by the cognis-ing subject. Thus, the individual mind can serve both in-dividual and organisational internal and external reality (Talja et al. 2005).

To avoid the issue of individualism, which is the focus of the Cog-C view, we also draw from the strength of Collectivism, which focus is on domains that form their contexts for information behaviour (what users do with information when they have it) and knowledge organisa-tion. But, the Cog-C takes individual searchers and their interaction with IR systems as its research object. It also takes the view that work tasks provide the primary con-text for information behaviour (Talja et al. 2005). The adoption of the Collectivist view to strengthen the aspect of “Context” with respect to individualism is informed by the understanding that (i) both Cog-C and Collectiv-ism find applicability as orientation strategies in IS, and (ii) they clearly complement each other (Talja et al. 2005).

The theory of constructivism seeks to contribute to the realization of user requirements’ elicitation. This is poised towards improving not only user interfaces, but user-system interactivity. For the theory of collectivism, it is used to underpin and orient this work towards informa-tion practices and knowledge organisation in the specific context of the Web environment that is highly dynamic. With respect to the theory of measurement, it is hoped that the proposed model will be empirically feasible and substantially quantitative (Scott and Suppes 1958). This is consistent with literature in terms of the desire to satisfy the need for using metatheories, since they serve as orien-tation strategies and are broader and all-encompassing than unit theories (Vakkari 1997, as cited in Talja et al. 2005).

With these postulations ordinal data was collected from users’ perspective based on their interactive experi-ences. The assumption accommodated was that users possess specific familiarity with the system as a result of their interactive experiences. Thus, we assumed that they can project how the system should be perceived, and as such data elicited from them will hopefully be a rich re-source to develop the evaluative model intended in this research. Following Bertini et al. (2013), and Morkos and Summers (2013), users’ requirements for WeSEs were ob-tained from users. Information about the model devel-oped, the data used and the sample adopted are presented next in the following sections. 4.3 Scale development, data collection and sample profile Following user-related research efforts of (e.g. Borlund and Ingwersen 1997; Shiri et al. 2004; Yang et al. 2005; Ong et al. 2009; Sumak et al. 2011), data were collected using the questionnaire survey technique. This happened within the space of six months using twenty-one (21) de-cision variables in a longitudinal experiment, which result is presented in this paper. The systematic random sam-pling technique, which allowed each users to have equal chances of involvement was employed. Ordinal data were therefore elicited from a non-simulated work task situa-tion that involved 250 real end users as test persons using a 5-point Likert scale of 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree) interpretation. It was assumed that the 250 re-spondents had been involved with the use of WeSEs. As such, they have experienced users’ pre-task (conceptual-ized and thought out their IN), post-task (had used any three WeSEs in attempt to satisfy their IN), and post-system usage (had used the information gotten, and are satisfied or unimpressed with the system). The demo-graphic variables used in the experiment include age, sex, status, and surfing experiences. This presentation is con-sistent with (e.g. Yang et al. 2005; Sumak et al. 2011), and



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the details of these demographics are presented in tabular form for easy sense making (see Table 1). 4.4 Data analysis and result This section describes the analysis and results for the two levels of the models intended in this paper. The explora-tory aspect of the FA was use to obtain the required a priori factor structure – the FoMM (see Figure 1 and Ta-bles 1 and 2).

Following Yang et al. (2005), the FoMM was specified to include four identified first-order factors that are corre-lated. Initially we were interested in factors with reasonable validity and reliability considering the goal of the paper. Thus, every observed variables with nonzero loading and measurement error terms were excluded. The reliability and validity of FoMM were tested using the CR and AVE (see Table 3 for meaning) parameters respectively.

Researchers in IS have foretell the possibility of an ad-vanced measurement model, if there exists a FoMM (Pa-rasuraman et al. 1988; Yang et al. 2005). Thus, an attempt was made to reconsider the FoMM with the aim of estab-lishing such possibility. The need for an advanced FoMM or a SoMM was informed by the need to demonstrate a superior evaluative measurement model. This was meant to underscore the assumption that better users’ require-ment could be consequently realized. Hence, a SoMM that imposes a structure on the pattern of correlations among the first-order factors that consequently generate a more parsimonious baseline evaluative or measurement mode is presented (see Figure 2).

Also, consistent with what is obtained in literature (Kumar and Dillon 1990), we demonstrate that a particular factor analytic model can ultimately determine the meaning and estimation of reliability and validity of the factors of the model. In other words, reliability and validity estimates

Dem Var. Age range Sex

Var.Desc. 16-25; 26-35; 36-45; 46-55; 56 & above

F; M

% 17 27 48 5 3 22 78

Dem Var. Status Surfing experi-ence

Var.Desc. Student.; Worker.; Re-searcher; Lecturer

Daily; Weekly; Monthly; Never

% 22 41 14 23 73 21 6 0

Table 1. Demographics sample size characteristics DemVar. (Demographic Variable); Var.Desc. (Variable

Description); % (Percentage showing freq. of occurrence); F (Female); M (Male);

Items i1 i2 i3 i4 i5 i6 i7 i8 i9 i10

Ldgs 0.75 0.67 0.57 0.75 0.69 0.66 0.68 0.66 0.67 0.70

Items i11 i12 i13 i14 i15 i16 i17 i18 i19 i20

Ldgs 0.65 0.77 0.69 0.65 0.66 0.65 0.58 0.60 0.55 0.67

Table 2. Result of Data Analysis for EFA Loadings. * Cut off of ≥ 0.45; Ldgs (Loadings),

EFA (Exploratory Factor Analysis)

Factors CR AVEInteractivity 0.65 0.56

Usability

0.87 0.54

Interfaces architecture 0.84 0.51

Content 0.71 0.65

Table 3. Result of CFA test of FoMM Loadings. CR (Composite Reliability); AVE (Average Variance Extracted)



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differ depending on the specification of the factor analytic model. Hence, the choice of a particular factor analytic measurement model is not an innocuous decision (Kumar and Dillon 1990). Thus, the models (e.g. FoMM and SoMM) presented are illustrative of degrees of reliability and validity. This means that the SoMM is illustrative of a more parsimonious approach to relating users’ needs as re-quirement for the development of IR systems.

Nevertheless, how to foretell the aforestated possibil-ity of a SoMM was not made clear in literature. We there-fore postulate that a sense of this could emanate starting from findings in the sample size characteristics of the us-ers’ population that took part in the survey experiment. For instance, in Table 1 the surfing experiences of the

users of the WeSEs that was surveyed showed that 73% of the total sample population size use SEs on the Web on a daily basis. This is very close in consistency with an earlier claim (see Sullivan 2003; Jansen and Spink 2006; Jansen and Molina 2006) that 80% of those who browse the Internet use one type of SE or the other. This prompted the desire to find out if a SoMM really existed. From Table 1, it is also obvious that the interactivity fac-tor fared better than others even with the slightest meas-ure. This prompted the initiative to consider loading it on other factors. The result showed that the FoMM demon-strated less reliability and validity as compared to SoMM (see Figure 2) when interactivity is loaded against the other three factors (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. First-order Measurement Model (FoMM).

Interactivity (Inter), Usability (Usa.), Interface Architecture (IntA.), and Content (Cont.) SEM result for FoMM (x2/d.f. = 2.55; GFI = 0.10, NFI = 0.099, CFI = 0.085,

NNFI = 0.097, RMSR = 0.034, RMSEA = 0.069.

Figure 2. Second-order Measurement Model

SEM result for SoMM (x2/d.f. = 2.52; GFI = 0.11, NFI = 0.10, CFI = 0.088, NNFI = 0.098, RMSR = 0.032, RMSEA = 0.067), & Value with * are CFA value.



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5.0 Proposed models There was need to revise the FoMM to achieve the SoMM because the factors of the FoMM were meant to communicate the requirements of users of WeSEs. Con-sistent with (e.g. Wu et al. 2008) and from within IS and IR literature items (see Table 2) were adopted from pre-viously published scales. In Akhigbe et al. (2014) the dy-namic and fluxing nature of the Web (Jensen 2006; Web-ber 2010) as earlier argued necessitated the need for the FoMM in Figure 1. This motivation remain the rationale for the SoMM. This is because of the overarching need for a better model from where users’ needs as require-ments can be communicated. In the FoMM a model with Baseline Criteria (BaCrit) was formulated. The bench-marks represent users’ needs against which users’ needs

as their requirements can be continuously compared. Thus, as proposed in (e.g. Bertini et al. 2013) the tech-nique of conceptualization as is in qualitative evaluative methodology was engaged to translate the BaCrit of the FoMM. These BaCrit allowed users’ judgments to be translated into their requirements (see Figure 3). This is because they are the outcome of the data analysis carried out using the FAs.

Hopefully, the SoMM and its constructs are expected to satisfy the need for baseline criteria or users’ needs as requirements. The motivation is to put in the hands of users the influence of navigating and harnessing the Web using SEs. The baseline properties (or qualities/attributes) of the FoMM and SoMM are founded in the infer-ential statistics – FA used in the paper. The replicability, and the degree of validity of the models contribute excel-

Figure 3. Baseline Criteria in its Conceptualized form based on the SoMM



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lently to the models’ baseline properties. This is demon-strated by the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) re-sults that is meant to establish further degree of validity and reliability. These results are presented under Figures 1 and 2. These models (at whatever level users’ need to use them) are extendable. With this unique property (i) the ability to accept new criteria (attributes) – factors as the need will arise due to the impacts the changing nature of the Web will make on the SEs, and (ii) the ability of the models not to be out-of-date or obsolete is guaranteed. Usually, system requirements are expected to reflect stakeholders’ needs, and also “describe system’s exter-nally-perceived functionality as well as certain properties at the desired granularity” (Soffer and Dori 2013).

For instance, Interactivity, Usability, Interfaces archi-tecture, and Content are user-centric attributes. This is what users’ experience and expectation, and users’ and system effectiveness are hinged on (Cheng et al. 2006; Lamm et al. 2010; Chen and Pu 2010). They are therefore indispensable at projecting users’ needs as requirements for systems. 6.0 Conclusion The novelty demonstrated in this paper is underscored by the findings (see the section on literature review) that previous studies did not consider how to relate IS’s eva-luative results as users’ needs. They excluded from their evaluative intentions the important aspect of communi-cating users’ needs as their requirements for WeSEs de-velopment particularly from the perspective of a dynamic context (or environment). This is rather unfortunate as well as enigmatic. This therefore emphasizes the fact that the user-centered methodology has continued to remain unpopular, unlike the system-centered evaluative meth-odology. This lack of popularity is quite visible with re-spect to the formulation of evaluative models, which eva-luative results can encapsulate users’ need(s) such that they relate (or specify) them as users’ requirement. This was the premise on which the initial work from which this paper builds from employed the user-centered ap-proach to develop a user-centered evaluative FoMM (Ak-higbe et al. 2014).

In this paper the FoMM (see Figure 1) was revised and an advanced version known as the SoMM (see Figure 2) was developed from it base on the rationale presented earlier on in this paper. The model’s qualities (see Figures 2 and 3) (attributes or criteria, which are evaluative re-sults) was used to relate users’ needs as requirement for WeSEs development. The motivation to communicate users’ needs as users’ requirement is underscored by the belief we share with Bouch et al. (2000), and Akhigbe et al. (2014). That is, the success of any WeSE in the deliv-

ery of desirable levels of assistance to users (e.g. in the future), especially in a dynamic context must be based, not only on the progress of technology, but also on us-ers’ requirements, which must be regularly re-examined.

The result of the test of the SoMM using the SEM technique of the FA showed better validity and reliability when compared to that of the FoMM. For instance, the SEM result for the SoMM is (x2/d.f. = 2.52; GFI = 0.11, NFI = 0.10, CFI = 0.088, NNFI = 0.098, RMSR = 0.032, RMSEA = 0.067), and that of the FoMM is (x2/d.f. = 2.55; GFI = 0.10, NFI = 0.099, CFI = 0.085, NNFI = 0.097, RMSR = 0.034, RMSEA = 0.069). When compared to the recommended value, which is (x2/d.f. ≤ 3.00; GFI ≥ 0.9, NFI ≥ 0.9, CFI ≥ 0.9, NNFI ≥ 0.9, RMSR ≤ 0.05, RMSEA ≤ 0.08) (see Wu et al. 2008), the superiority of the SoMM over the FoMM is evidently quite illustrative.

Hopefully, based on the aforementioned statistical re-sults, the baseline criteria raised and presented using the SoMM as a build up from the FoMM when implemented should inform better WeSEs development. Therefore, the resultant WeSE(s) should do better. This can be gauged in terms of how they would (i) assists users to cope with the unpredicted and changing environment (context) of the Web, (ii) support users to have fulfilled user experi-ences when using WeSEs, (iii) assists users in locating documents that contain information that satisfies their IN to unimaginable extent, and (iv) give enhance user ex-perience, expectation, and provide system effectiveness. This means stakeholders and investors with particular in-terest in e-Commerce, and those in pursuit of better knowledge organization tool(s) would find the models use-ful in the investigation of users’ requirement for WeSEs.

Aside from the stated implications of this paper in the previous paragraph, this paper’s contributions include that: (i) the FoMM and SoMM should become a norm in the investigation of users’ requirement, not for WeSEs alone, but for other IR systems. This is consequent upon the degree of reliability the FoMM and the SoMM dem-onstrated, which can principally be attributed to the sta-tistical model employed in their formulation, (ii) interac-tivity should be studied and treated in WeSEs’ develop-ment as the vortex of IR (Ingwersen and Jarvelin 2007), and (iii) interactivity should be investigated as a subjective variable that is influenced by several factors even more than the ones considered in the formulation of the SoMM (see Figures 2 and 3). The extent to which there is mapping between objective and subjective quality of ser-vice delivery by WeSE, and the contextual factors that can influence users’ ability to cope with information seek-ing and searching shall be rigorously pursued in the fu-ture. With respect to the Web-based environment and its dynamic context these issues have not been investigated.



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Appendix A: (Measurement Scale) Find below the 20 outstanding items of the 21 items pre-sented in the experiment (the item with *** was removed during EFA) 1. Selectivity or complexity of choice 2. Users exert less effort to access information 3. Responsiveness to the user 4. Monitoring of information use 5. The ease of adding information by user 6. Facilitation of interpersonal communication 7. Supports me to perform my tasks 8. The search facilities are adequate 9. Customized search functions 10. The system provides the precise information I

need*** 11. Customized information presentation 12. Well-organized hyperlinks 13. Time to learn 14. Retention over time 15. Speed of performance 16. Real-time response 17. Rate of errors by users 18. Subjective satisfaction 19. The system content meet my needs 20. It provides reports that seem to be what I need 21. The system provides sufficient information


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Brief Communication: Phronesis Knowledge as Enabler

of Intuitive Decision Making

Sami Ullah Bajwa,* Naveda Kitchlew,** Khuram Shahzad***, Khaliq Ur Rehman****

School of Business and Economics, University of Management and Technology, C-II Johar Town Lahore, Pakistan,

*<[email protected]>, **<[email protected]>, ***<[email protected]>, ****<[email protected]>

Bajwa, Sami Ullah, Kitchlew, Naveda, Shahzad, Khuram, and Ur Rehman, Khaliq. Brief Communication Phronesis Knowledge as Enabler of Intuitive Decision Making. Knowledge Organization. 42(1), 40-49. 67 references. Abstract:: Drawing on Nonaka and colleagues’ recent concept of phronesis, as a third type of knowledge that is connoted with practical wisdom, the present article proposes that intuitive decision making ability propels with phronesis. Furthermore, it proposes that cognitive adaptability—as the ability to quickly make sense of changing and complex situations – along with personality, as consistent patterns of behaviors based on social learning, are antecedents of phronesis. The article furnishes a conceptual frame based on contemporary litera-ture on intuition, phronesis, cognitive adaptability, situated cognition, metacognition, and social learning theory of personality.

Received: 27 January 2015; Revised: 24 February 2015; Accepted: 13 February 2015.

Keywords: cognitive, cognition, personality, adaptability, knowledge, individuals, social theory, phronesis, decision-making 1.0 Introduction Recently, Nonaka and colleagues (Nonaka et al. 2014) have proposed that knowledge is of three types, namely tacit, explicit and phronesis. While tacit and explicit forms of knowledge are prevalent and widely accepted in literature, the notion of phronesis as practical wisdom has opened a new foray of discussion in the field of knowledge man-agement. Based on theoretical foundations of a new branch of cognition research, namely cognitive adaptabil-ity, it is construed that practical wisdom comes from the ability to quickly and correctly understand complex, dy-namic and novel contexts, and accordingly take appropriate actions. Cognitive adaptability is defined here as the ability to make sense of the dynamic and complex situations and devise viable solutions for it. This conceptualization begets two important points. One that practical wisdom is about understanding complex and dynamic contexts and making effective decisions. In complex and dynamic situations, where critical factors for a decision are rapidly changing

and information about them is insufficient, managers make intuitive decisions. Practical wisdom, in this sense, enables intuitive decision making. Secondly, phronesis—practical wisdom as explicated by Nonaka et al. (2014) —is pro-pelled by cognitive adaptability skills of individuals. In this backdrop, this article suggests that cognitive adaptability is the antecedent of phronesis, which enables intuitive deci-sion making.

There is almost universal agreement among organiza-tional scientists that decision making is the essence of management; and its importance for short, medium or long term success of an organization cannot be overem-phasized. Decision making, however, often occurs in situations where information, regarding the varying fac-tors which could affect the effectiveness of that decision, is very limited, thus making it a complex and non-linear process (Jonassen 1997; Mason and Mitroff 1981). This situation, in the terminology of management sciences, is referred as a complex and uncertain business environ-ment (Morgan 1986; Stacey 1995). The choice of the


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right option in such uncertain and complex situations is tricky and becomes even more difficult if factors that have potential to affect the efficacy of choice are chang-ing on a high pace (MacIntosh et al. 2006; Stacey 2007).

Contemporary literature suggests that managers rely on their intuition to make decisions, in such dynamic and complex situations (Burke and Miller 1999). Intuition here is connoted with previous experiences, sixth sense and gut feelings of decision makers. Given that today’s business environment is insistently getting uncertain and complex (Daft 2009), scholars have pointed out that there is press-ing need to move ahead of this fuzzy connotation of intui-tion with feelings and sixth sense and postulate more ra-tional explanation of this important phenomenon. Intui-tive decisions inextricably require ability to correctly and quickly make sense of the changing contexts and accord-ingly take appropriate actions. In their recent paper Nonaka et al. (2014) have suggested that the value judg-ments of the context and action oriented practical wisdom emanates from phronesis—a third type of knowledge, in addition to traditionally known tacit and explicit forms of knowledge. Drawing on this conception, the present article proposes that intuitive ability of managers is not merely a gut feeling or dubious sixth sense; rather it is an ability that stems out of their phronetic knowledge. It also furnishes that cognitive adaptability—defined as ability to quickly make sense of the changing contexts and act accord-ingly—in juxtaposition of personality traits paves way to the development of phronesis in individuals that enable them to make effective decisions under complex and un-certain situations.

The paper is structured as follows. To begin with, it de-scribes the underpinnings of the concept of phronesis and explicates certain conceptual nodes of the concept that re-late to the emerging theory of cognitive adaptability. The second section, discusses emergence of the concept of cognitive adaptability and its theoretical roots. The third section highlights the significance of person-environment fit for making decisions under uncertainty, and drawing on social learning theory of personality concludes that certain personality traits serve as antecedents of cognitive adapta-bility and hence phronetic knowledge that enables individ-ual’s ability to make effective intuitive decisions. 2.0 The concept of phronesis as source of intuition,

and its relationship with cognitive adaptability Intuition has been conceptualized as a “sixth sense, a para-normal power, a gut instinct, an evaluative affect, an innate personality trait, and an accumulation of experience” (Langan-Fox and Shirley 2003). Though intuition, in its general connotation, has been referred a subconscious process with no apparent intrusion of rational thinking

and reasoning (Sadler-Smith and Shefy 2004), some schol-ars, especially belonging to the field of human psychology, have argued that intuition is embedded in social cognition of individuals and is a manifestation of tacit knowledge of the individuals. These conceptualizations call for a deeper analysis of this important decision-making frame. Social cognition theory suggests that individuals learn from their social interaction and the better they understand social contexts, the better they would be in making decisions. So-cial interactions propel ethical codes as well as innate boundaries for individuals in which they interpret the con-text they are faced by. In this sense, intuition is constrained by ethical principles and frames of references for defining realities and understanding contexts which individuals ac-quire from their social settings. Inextricably, importance of exposure, experience and mentorship remain pertinent in developing the said ethical boundaries and frames of refer-ence. Thus, in the absence of clear information about im-portant variables, decisions are made with the help of ac-cumulated knowledge, social interaction based ethical con-sideration and frame of reference for defining context, and innate personality traits. The better the decision maker un-derstands context, the more effective decision he would make and hence more wisdom he would be believed to have. Recently, Nonaka et al. (2014) have proposed that tacit and explicit knowledge exist mutually as there are no pure forms of either of these. Hence, when we say that in-tuition is a manifestation of tacit knowledge, it should rather be said that intuition is an outcome of both the tacit and explicit knowledge and above noted other factors. Fur-thermore, the authors have proposed that action-oriented practical wisdom and value judgments of the situational context are another form of knowledge, namely phronesis, which is not covered in tacit or explicit types. Since con-ceptualization of phronesis includes ethics, value judg-ments of the context and practical wisdom, it can be con-strued that intuition stems out of the phronetic knowledge of individuals.

The postulation of phronesis criticizes the traditional information-processing model of the Carnegie school of thought. Two main assumptions of the subject thought are flawed. One, there is no pure tacit and explicit forms of knowledge (every knowledge has both forms existent), and similarly “creation and utilization of knowledge oc-cur simultaneously and cannot be separated” (Osono, Kodama, Yachi, & Nonaka 2006). This proposition as-serts that while making intuitive decisions individuals not only use their existing knowledge but also generate new knowledge out of their interaction with environmental factors and context. As discussed in the later section, this assertion is consistent with the theory of situated cogni-tion, which is primary constituent of the concept of cog-nitive adaptability. Secondly, knowledge is not merely the


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processing of information, which is already out there and hence there is no room for individual subjectivity in knowledge creation process. In negation to this, the au-thors propose that “knowledge is information in context” and individuals define context in lieu of their subjective understanding of the situation, previous tacit and explicit knowledge, and teleology – or in other words the values. The authors argue that “with the triad relationship among tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, and phronesis we are now able to incorporate value judgments into the knowl-edge creation process as they are embedded in phronesis. These value judgments help interpret contexts, grasp the essence, and create meaning out of the contexts.” This stance is consistent with cognitive research which dem-onstrates that influence of the environmental characteris-tics, like uncertainty, on cognition is subjective, perceptual and dynamic (Hilton 1995; Neuberg 1989; Schwarz 1996; Tetlock 1990).

The central point of both of the noted conceptual as-sumptions of the concept of phronesis is focused on

context and an individual’s ability to apply his subjective knowledge for understanding the context and accordingly take actions. Contemporary cognition and entrepreneurial research suggest that individuals make use of cognitive adaptability skills for understanding context and applying their subjective knowledge to devise action plan for that (Hyne 2005). Cognitive adaptability is an emerging con-cept in entrepreneurship and cognition literature. Increas-ing amounts of research tend to posit cognitive adapta-bility as a source of effective decision making (Laureiro-Martínez et al. 2009) and performance in dynamic envi-ronments (Reder and Schunn 1999). Especially, in dealing with uncertain situations where decisions have to be made without prior comprehensive knowledge, it is ob-served that entrepreneurs rely on their cognitive adapta-bility skills (Haynie et al. 2010). Cognitive adaptability is thus an ability which is essential for every decision maker; but its significance is immense for entrepreneurs, in par-ticular, because the entrepreneurial task itself and the en-vironment surrounding it has been studied fundamentally

Figure 1. Phronesis as Enabler of Intuitive Decision Making.


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dynamic, risky, and uncertain (Knight 2012; McGrath 1999; Zahra et al. 2002). Research on sense-making sub-stantiates this notion by explaining, in detail, that cogni-tive process to make sense of the environment, and ca-pability to do so, varies among individuals and conse-quently some decision-makers are intrinsically better than others in performing under uncertain situations (Weick et al. 2005). The proposition is also consistent with the con-ception that an organization can be construed as an ‘evolving organism’ which is subjective to its key deci-sion-makers’ identification and management of emerging patterns of the forces of change (Morgan 1986).

Since Nonaka et al. (2014) didn’t described the onto-logical position of phronesis and connoted it with practical wisdom, value judgments for subjective understanding of context; it is cogent to propose that cognitive adaptabil-ity—the ability to make subjective sense of context, better than others, and accordingly take actions—is antecedent of phronesis. It is thus cognitive adaptability that dovetails in-dividual’s phronetic ability to demonstrate practical wisdom by better understanding of the dynamic and complex con-texts. Based on this phronetic knowledge, individuals make effective intuitive decisions. Besides cognitive adaptability, personality is also an important antecedent of phronesis, as discussed in the later section. The following section, dis-cusses emergence and theoretical support of the concept of cognitive adaptability. 3.0 Concept of cognitive adaptability:

emergence and theoretical foundations A human being is a thinking creature. The statement sounds simple and is generally accepted, but has been the underlying subject of many unsettled philosophic debates and scientific inquiries since the ancient times. It has pro-pelled a foray of striking questions like – are the sources of inputs for ‘thinking’ internal or external to an individual (Maturana et al. 1995); does the mind have innate capacity to comprehend the external realities or what we believe true is merely our perception about truth (Gallagher and Frith 2003); do people have different thinking patterns and are these patterns static or evolving (Kelso 1995), and so on and so forth. The field which attempts to answer these and many other similar questions—by studying mental processes like sense making, perception and thinking—is referred to as cognition (Estes 1975). It is concerned with describing comprehensive mental processes including per-ception, ideas, acquiring and organizing information in the mind etc., to explain the process of knowing, thinking and solving problems (Koseoglu and Onder 2011).

Neisser (1967) defined cognition as “all processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used.” The definition is consistent

with the two established streams of cognition research; namely cognitive psychology and social cognition. The stream of cognitive psychology is predominantly centric to explore the internal mechanisms of the mind which enable human beings to make sense of the inputs received from sensory organs, interpret, and structure these cues for on-ward usage (Sampson 1981). Whereas, theory of social cognition is specifically concerned with explaining proc-esses of mind that take place within individuals in their in-teraction with other people (Fiske and Taylor 2013). The difference between these two branches of cognition stud-ies, therefore, is of focus on two different parts, one of which we would argue is more explicit and the other one rather implicit, of the aforementioned definition proposed by Neisser (1967). The definition explicitly emphasizes that field of cognition outlines the study of configuration of the human mind and its processes; and thus dovetails with the cognitive psychology which also lays emphasis on pat-terns and functioning of the human mind. Nonetheless, the definition also states that cognition is all about process-ing the sensory inputs which individuals acquire from their environment through their sensory organs. Therefore, the definition also highlights, though implicitly, that cognition is about making use of the inputs that human acquire, through their sensory organs, in their interaction with envi-ronment surrounding them. Since the environment around individuals primarily pivots on their fellow human beings, this implicit part of definition is perfectly aligned with the field of social cognition.

Scholars have suggested that traditionally study of cogni-tion has been overwhelming centric to the mechanisms of mind (cognitive psychology) rather than interaction of hu-man mind with the environment surrounding him (Amodio and Frith 2006). Even the strand of social cognition has been focusing, to a great extent, on ‘brain’ rather than the ‘social context in which the brain works.’ Some authors have suggested that this tendency was further augmented with the invention of computers and emergence of information technology (Clancey 1997). The mind was seen akin to the processer of a computer which takes input though input de-vices and processes it to produce final output; and resul-tantly, an enormous amount of research has been focused on studying the process of perception, storing information and making connection of it in mind, and then retrieving it to make decisions (Rumelhart 1998). The computer meta-phor continues to become popular to the extent that lately it has been postulated that even organizations could be inter-preted as brains or information processing systems (Morgan 2006).

The aforementioned gap emerged with the relative ne-glect of cognitive psychology on the context in which mind works, and invited the attention of researchers to recognize the need of developing more inclusive models to


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study social psychology and appreciate the influence of environmental conditions on mental processes of indi-viduals (Operario and Fiske 1999). Especially, psycholo-gists – involved in cognition research – argued that despite having its roots in cognition research, the field of social cognition has excessively incorporated computer metaphor as underlying assumption while framing research context (Schneider 1991). Furthermore, this metaphor is inade-quate to encapsulate the effects of emotions and motiva-tions on human cognition, and is somewhat insensitive to embrace the social context under which individuals do per-form their thinking (Bransford and Schwartz 1999). This reorientation of the cognition paradigm with increased re-alization that patterns of individual’s thinking, or in other words cognition, develop and evolve in response to the en-vironmental context led to the emergence of a new, and a rather broad, branch of cognition research namely, situated cognition (Tetlock and Lerner 1999).

In a major divergence from the old computer metaphor, which has had dominated cognition research during the decades of seventies and eighties, situated cognition advo-cates that human cognition is heavily influenced by the in-dividual’s motivations and that his cognitive patterns are adaptive, rather than being static, to the environmental context around him. Situated cognition describes an indi-vidual as a fully mindful thinker who develops assorted cognitive strategies and based on his needs, goals and mo-tivations—selects among available strategies (Operario and Fiske 1999). The situated cognition perspective, therefore, advanced the field of cognition sciences by conceptualiz-ing that a human as thinking creature was a rather compli-cated entity who performs his thinking function in a broad context of his knowledge, desires, motives, perception, ex-periences and personal values (Operario and Fiske 1999). The perspective impelled researchers to contemplate that cognition is not only to study the structure and innate ca-pacity of mind and its thinking functions; it also fosters the insights that cognition, to a certain extent, is a function of the environment. Particularly, it brought forward three im-portant features of human cognition. First of all, there are multiple strategies available to individuals and those who are better than others in identifying and understanding im-portant cues from environment will opt for effective strategies. Secondly, instead of being helpless and a pas-sive-subject of the environment, individuals are mindful and able to control themselves in acquisition and interpre-tation of cues from the environment. Thirdly, in incidents of rapidly changing environments, those individuals will remain advantageous who demonstrate a flexible and adap-tive thinking pattern.

Situated cognition theory, thus, provides a theoretical base to cognitive adaptability. Likewise, the theory of meta-cognition is another theory that lends to the development

of cognitive adaptability concept. Metacognition is referred to individual’s ability to be aware of and control his learn-ing patterns (Schraw and Dennison 1994), which makes him more adaptive in dynamic and uncertain contexts (Earley and Ang 2003). In a simple definition, metacogni-tion is described as knowing about knowing (Haynie 2005). While defining cognitive adaptability, Haynie and Shepherd and McMullen (2009) suggested that this ability is an ag-gregate of “goal orientation, metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, metacognitive control, and monitoring.” The following section briefly discusses these five dimensions. 3.1 Goal Orientation Scholars suggest that there exists a two way relationship between situation (context) and motives of individuals. The context of an individual influences formation of his or her motives (Wyer Jr. and Srull 1989b); whereas, at the same time motives influence one’s perception and inter-pretation of the context (Griffin and Ross 1991). Ac-cordingly, Haynie and Shepherd (2009) suggested that goals of entrepreneurs are emerged in interaction of their multiple motives and context surrounding them, both having a reciprocal effect on each other, and that consciously knowing the process of goal formation serves as origins of cognitive adaptability. 3.2 Metacognitive Knowledge Metacognitive knowledge is referred to as the conscious consideration of the cognition functions performed in one’s mind in interaction with people, tasks and strategies (Von Wright 1992). Consideration includes both – one understands his or her own preference, personal style of dealing with environment, weakness, and strengths; as well as concern about how others look at various situa-tions. Metacognitive knowledge about tasks, strategies, other people and oneself facilitates an individual to gen-erate multiple frameworks for decisions to manage the changing environment (Haynie 2005). 3.3 Metacognitive Experience The mental orientation of an individual towards the emo-tions, memories and experience which he or she has en-dured is referred to as metacognitive experience (Flavell et al. 1985). Such affective-based assessment serves as hunches or intuition of entrepreneurs while making deci-sions (Miller and Ireland 2005) and enable individuals to effectively figure out their social context (Earley and Ang 2003). More individuals rely on their hunches, or in other words guts, while managing their environment, more than


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they would be using their metacognitive experience (Haynie and Shepherd 2009). 3.4 Metacognitive Choice While attempting to cope with the changing environment, individuals make use of matacognitive knowledge and ex-perience (Wyer Jr. and Srull 1989a) to select that decision framework out of the available alternatives, which best fits their goal orientation (Haynie 2005). In this sense, mata-cognitive choices is the extent to which individuals select choice from the generated alternatives, while being con-scious to select alternatives which most appropriately matches their goal orientation (Haynie and Shepherd 2009). 3.5 Monitoring Selection of an appropriate alternative leads towards im-plementation of the choice, and subsequently engaging into the post implementation cognitive processes—which provides feedback on the effectiveness of the decisions (Flavell et al. 1985). Monitoring the extent to which actual performance matches with the goal orientation helps an individual to make an evaluation of his or her motives (Nelson and Narens 1994), metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, and selection of the particular decision framework (Haynie and Shepherd 2009). 4.0 Cognitive adaptability as antecedent of phronesis Cognitive adaptability has been defined as the ability to quickly understand complex and dynamic situations and accordingly take effective actions. Postulation of practical wisdom as the ability to make sense of the complex and dynamic tasks and make effective intuitive decisions, there-fore, is consistent with emerging stream of cognitive adaptability research. The concept of cognitive adaptability has been emerged on the theoretical grounds of situated cognition (thinking about thinking) and situated cognition (situation specific cognition). Based on the above discus-sion, it is furnished that cognitive adaptability is antecedent of phronesis. 4.1 Personality as antecedent of cognitive adaptability

and phronesis In organizational studies, personality has been mostly de-scribed in terms of measurable traits. With the increasing popularity of organizational behavior perspective (Pfeffer 2007) for competitiveness and performance of organiza-tions, subjects like behavior and personality etc. got grow-ing attention from researchers and practitioners. Unlike

complex description of personality theories, organizational studies employ a relatively simple definition and give more emphasis on measuring personality traits, or dimensions, and studying the relationship of these dimensions/traits with other facets of organizational life. Accordingly, the definition proposed by Cattell and Tregaskis (1965), which described personality as combination of behavioral and cognitive patterns that are consistent for a long time pe-riod, is frequently used. This definition offers a lead to conceptualize a relationship of personality with cognitive adaptability. To begin with, definition suggests that person-ality is an outcome of cognitive patterns, which essentially means that a person having flexible and adaptive cognitive patterns would have different personality traits then those who would have less adaptive cognitive patterns. Moreover, the second part of definition connotes personality as con-sistent behavioral patterns; and behavior has been studied as an outcome of attitude—which is constituted with cog-nitive, behavioral and affective components (Ajzen and Fishbein 1977). Therefore, behavioral patterns of individu-als also stem, partially, out of his or her cognitive patterns. In addition to this, it is by and large accepted that personal-ity traits are inherited, to a certain extent, as well as devel-oped in individual’s interaction with the environment (Davidson et al. 2006). Cognition is thus a common thread between personality and cognitive adaptability and the process of personality development is influenced by the environment of the individual. In view of this strong rela-tionship between personality, cognition, and environment, it is reasonable to assume that personality would have a re-lationship with those cognitive patterns which enable an individual to adapt the changing environment, or in other words cognitive adaptability. Theories of personality shed better light on this postulation.

Theories of personality, having roots in philosophy and psychology, are characterized by hundreds of defini-tions and complex propositions regarding the construct and development process of personality. Hall and Locke (1985) noted that in these definitions, personality has been termed in either evaluative or descriptive statements. For instance when we say that someone has an amazing personality, we present our evaluation about him or her, and when we describe someone as inspiring person, we tend to describe him or her. Furthermore, based on a me-ticulous analysis of various landmark theories, Hall and Lock also suggested that these personality theories can be grouped into following four broad classifications.

The first of these groups, hinges on the common point of “psychodynamic forces.” Starting from the clas-sical theory of Sigmund Freud, this group includes con-temporary work of Erik Erikson, analytical psychology of Carl Jung, interpersonal dynamics of Alfred Alder, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and Harry Stack. The sec-


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ond group centers on “experiencing person” and includes the work of Abraham Maslow, the existential psychology of Ludwig and Mederad, and the personal world as de-scribed by Kurt Lewin and George Kelly. The third group focuses on “enduring characteristics” of individu-als and includes personality work of Murray, the person’s uniqueness of Allport, the genetic view of Sheldon and the factor analysis of Cattell. Finally the fourth group is focused on personality with a perspective of “learning & environment,” with the pioneering work of reinforce-ment theory of Skinner, stimulus theory of Miller, and personality as social learning by Bandura.

The theory of personality as social learning provides admissible explanation to cognitive adaptability. The theory builds upon the work of personality theorists like Skin-ner—who brought forward the notion of learning from environment as fundamental element of personality—and underlines that somehow these theorists have missed ac-counting for two main phenomena in postulating the rela-tionship between personality and environment. First, hu-man beings are not mere passive objects of environment; rather they can think of and regulate their behavior. Sec-ond, much of the personality development of an individ-ual involves interaction with others; therefore to study per-sonality the social context in which behavior is acquired and maintained becomes pertinent. Before going into the further details of this theory, especially how it relates to cognition, it is worth noting here that both of these phe-nomena, as underlined by Bandura, are related to two main cognition theories which has led to the emergence of the concept of cognitive adaptability, namely situated cogni-tion and metacognition (as discussed in literature review ). The proposition of the theory of social learning that hu-man beings can think and regulate their behavior is consis-tent with the theory of metacognition—whereby meta-cognition is described as higher order thinking process which enables an individual to think about his thinking style and regulate his behavior. Whereas the second propo-sition of the theory of personality as social learning that personality should be studied in the social context, in which behavior is acquired and maintained, is in line with the theory of situated cognition—which emphasizes that cognitive patrons of individuals are developed in preview of the social context of that individual.

The social learning theory of personality explains hu-man behavior in terms of a continuing reciprocal interac-tion between environment and cognition (Bandura 1977). For Bandura, this reciprocal relationship, called reciprocal determinism, led to the personality development whereby individuals influence the environment around them, and simultaneously are controlled by the environment. Fur-thermore, the central point of this reciprocal relationship between individual and environment is ‘self system’ –

which is referred as cognitive structure of an individual that serves as orientation for functions like perception, evaluation, and control of behavior (Bandura 1978). Social learning theory of personality, therefore, proposes that the behavior and change in the behavior of an individual is de-termined by his or her cognitive structures, called self sys-tem, which enable him or her to rethink and regulate be-havior in the face of environment. Whereas, a similar pos-tulation underpins theories of metacognition and situated cognition.

Like the social learning theory of personality, the theory of situated cognition suggests that the cogitative patterns of individuals are adaptive to the environmental actors (Taylor et al. 1997). Human behavior, as per situated cogni-tion theory, is guided by how he or she makes sense of the environment; and this sense making process is influenced by environment as well as individual’s motivation. This postulation of situated cognition theory has offered two new exciting dimensions to the cognition research. At one side, it propels a considerable divergence from the com-puter metaphor of cognition studies which was focused on brain as information processing mechanism (Barron et al. 1998), by emphasizing the importance of social context which influences the development and adaptability of mechanisms of mind. While, on the other side, it posits a human a fully conscious and motivated being who think upon, generate multiple cognitive strategies and based on his goals, needs and motives selects the best suitable strat-egy (Showers and Cantor 1985). As noted by Operario and Fiske (1999), situated cognition theory has led to abandon-ing the one-dimensional way of looking at human cogni-tion and emphasizing that humans are complex entities who incorporate their knowledge, values, motivations and experiences while interacting to the environmental actors. Human learning, therefore, comes out to be the ability to generate and use different resources for acquiring knowl-edge in the process of interaction of internal cognitive processes of an individual and in his/her environment (Greeno 1991). The first step of this process is called en-coding—a cognitive processes which is held at a non-conscious level—whereby individuals create a mental ori-entation towards an environment, which then is linked to the previous knowledge and motivations for taking infer-ences of the environment and subsequently taking appro-priate action (Brunsson 1982). The propositions of situ-ated cognition, especially the view that individuals have multiple cognitive strategies in a given task, provide fun-damental theoretical input to the emergence of the con-cept of cognitive adaptability. Similarly, it gives the clear idea that in addition to cognitive processes, there is a higher level of cognition, occurring at an unconscious level, which en-ables an individual to generate multiple strategies to take in-ferences from and deal with the environment.


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The theory of metacognition, however, suggests that unlike the proposition of situated cognition theory – that higher level cognition process occurs at unconscious level – cognitive function are performed in a hierarchical system, where cognition is a lower order constituent which is mainly responsible for handling informational cues, and metacognition is a higher order process which organizes an individual’s knowledge about himself, tasks and the envi-ronment around him. This higher order process, is fully conscious, and enables an individual to rethink his lower level cognition functions in a way which facilitates identify-ing multiple cognitive strategies for achieving the desired tasks. Haynie (2005) has suggested that this particular flexi-bility comes from 5 established metacognition dimensions and may collectively be termed cognitive adaptability. Metacognition, thus, focuses on that part of cognition which is concerned with studying how an individual deals with people and other environmental actors (Suchman 1993). (Baker-Brown et al. 1990) suggested that during this interaction, an individual’s mental models are influenced and shaped with input received from environment. Whereas, other cognition scientists like Schacter et al. (2000) suggest that during this interaction between an indi-vidual and the environment, goals of individual play a cen-tral role as he/she comprehends environment in the back-drop of his or her goals and motives. The theory of meta-cognition, therefore, gives high consideration to interaction of an individual’s motives and environmental actors, while suggesting that the more a person is metacognitively aware, the more he or she will reconsider his/her cognitive strate-gies to deal with the environment. Understandably, high metacognitive awareness—and resultantly more cognitive flexibility—will be crucial in a dynamic environment and the result of these metacognitive strategies will reflect in cognitive, behavioral, and emotional responses of individ-ual. Since personality is described as a function of behav-ior, and behavior has been suggested as outcome of emo-tional, cognitive and behavioral components of individual’s attitude (Rothbart et al. 2000), we can construe that the theory of metacognition suggests high correlation between personality and metacognition.

To sum up, the theory of situated cognition suggests that the cognition of an individual is influenced, and par-tially shaped, by the environment in which he or she oper-ates; and at an unconscious level, human beings their mo-tives, experiences and previous knowledge in interpreting and interacting with the environment. Theory of metacog-nition, however, suggests that instead of an unconscious level, the incorporation of motives and knowledge etc. is performed at a conscious and higher level of cognition, where individuals are not only aware of their own patterns of deploying their motives and knowledge etc, but can also reconsider these patterns according to the changing re-

quirements of environment. This flexibility of one’s own cognitive patterns, termed as cognitive adaptability by Haynie (2005), reflects in one’s behaviors, emotional and cognition. While personality is described as a function of behavior and behavior is articulated as an outcome of cog-nitive, emotional and behavioral components of one’s atti-tude; clearly there is a theoretical concurrence that person-ality is a predictor of cognitive adaptability skills. Taking the flip side of it, different personalities would have differ-ent levels of cognitive adaptability skills. 5.0 Conclusion Intuition is widely acknowledged as an important decision making frame in the face of complex and dynamic situa-tions. This paper undertook review of literature on deci-sion-making and cognition, and postulated that intuitive ability propels with practical wisdom of the individual. Ac-cordingly, it explicated that practical wisdom lies in one’s ability to understand the novel and complex contexts and take appropriate and admissible decisions. Recent assertion of the concept of phronesis by Nonaka et al. (2014), as a third type of knowledge which is practically oriented and encompasses value judgment of the context as we as value of decision maker, is consistent with abovementioned pos-tulation of practical wisdom. It is, therefore, proposed that phronesis is an enabler of intuition. Furthermore, postula-tion of practical wisdom as ability to make sense of the complex and dynamic tasks and make effective intuitive decisions is consistent with emerging stream of cognitive adaptability research. The concept of cognitive adaptability has been emerged on the theoretical grounds of metacog-nition (thinking about thinking) and situated cognition (situation specific cognition). Cognitive adaptability has a strong correlation with personality types, and social learn-ing theory of personality explicated how personality, as consistent patterns of behavior based on social learning, provides rational to the question that why some individuals posses more cognitive adaptability than others. The article thus concluded that personality and cognitive adaptability are antecedents of phronesis; and phronetic knowledge is an enabler of intuitive decision making. References Ajzen, Icek and Martin Fishbein. 1977. “Attitude-Behavior

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Classification Issues

Categories, Contexts and Relations in Knowledge Organization

The 12th International ISKO Conference, Mysore, India

Nancy J. Williamson

Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street, Toronto M5S 3G6 Ontario Canada <[email protected]>

Under the broad title Categories, Contexts and Relations in Knowledge Organization, 54 papers were pre-sented in 12 categories. This analysis is based on the published volume. It also contains abstracts for 10 poster sessions but these will not be analysed here.

The keynote address set the context for the programme. In his

paper on “Universes, Dimensions, Domains. Intensions and extensions” Richard Smiraglia provides a domain analysis of knowledge organization as a means of visualiz-ing the emergence and coherence of our domain, and as a way of dominating the parameters of the universe (or uni-verses) in which our domain operates, as well as the dimen-sions of the operational paradigms at work. As the basis for going forward he gave the conference a picture of the major research and publication from the last twenty years of the 20th century. As the basis for his data he uses the four journals which predominate–Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Library Resources and Technical Services, Library Quar-terly, and Knowledge Organization. Data gathered covered 4 as-pects of the literature–works of prior domain-analytical studies of KO from 1931 through 2010; the extension (topics) and intension (aspects) of the topics; most cited authors in KO in three conference, 2007, 2008 and 2010 and the themes from the 2011 Regional ISKO conferences. The results of the analysis indicated trends in the nature of the KO domain.

Six papers addressed broadly the Domain of Knowl-edge Organization. Birger Hjorland (Denmark) ad-dressed the question “Is knowledge organization = In-

formation organization?” His concern is the relationship among the terms knowledge organization information organization, organization of information and informa-tion architecture. For example, what difference does it make whether we use the term knowledge or the term in-formation in LIS or KO? He analyzes the varying views and demonstrates how bibliometrics accompanied by a study of contents of the most cited works may be used to determine how concepts are used in different fields. Peter Ohly (Germany) examined “Mission, Programs, and Challenges of Knowledge Organization.” He notes the difference between the traditional single access and the multi approach in web-based systems. He defines knowledge organization and identifies the challenges, finding that the users of knowledge as well as the index-ers, have very fluid notions of knowledge and its use.

In the pre-digital world the experts dictated the values to users, whereas in the digital world the public and skilled users set the norms for the experts. In the light of this situation Ohly considers the theoretical foundations of knowledge organization. There has to be a “new” knowledge organization to accommodate the semantic web. It has to turn back to formal semantic approaches and enable reasoning for a number of sources and has to be logically more precise. There are still a number of questions to be answered.

Rick Szostak (Canada) presented a proposed new classi-fication “The Basic Concepts Classification.” He describes the justification for the possible structure, gives a brief out-line, provides an example and describes the benefits of such a system. Three authors from Brazil–José Augusto Chaves Guimarães, Ely Tannuri de Oliveira and Maria Clàudia Cabrini Gracio discussed “Theoretical Referents in


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Knowledge Organization” using a domain analysis of the Knowledge Organization journal. Taking the most productive authors, they analyzed the dialogue among citing and cited authors. Working with 310 articles published between 1993 and 2011 by 360 authors, the analysis confirmed cohesion and coherence in the production of the journal and to visualize and confirm KO as a catalyzing agent of interna-tional theoretical constuction. José Augusto Chaves Gui-maràes (Brazil) and Joseph T. Tennis (United States) exam-ined “Constant Pioneers: the Citation Frontiers of Index-ing Theory in the ISKO International Proceedings.” They carried out a citation analysis in which three areas of citing and cited authors surfaced corresponding to a geographic distribution - a subject cataloguing tradition which has its base in North America; indexing based on the work of the Society of indexers; and analyse documentaire from the French tradition explained and based in logic procedures. “What is clear from the study is that indexing theorists are constant pioneers constantly charting new territory by in-corporating new literature into the field of indexing and maneuvering in a particular tradition (p. 42).” Finally, Aline Elis Arboit and three other authors (Brazil) addressed “The Relationship between Authors and Main Thematic Categories in the Field of Knowledge Organization.” Tak-ing a bibliometric approach to the last five ISKO Confer-ences from 2002 to 2010. The aim was to map the domain. The most productive authors were identified and the rela-tionships among those authors identified the major areas of research. Each paper used a different of research proc-ess to define the domain. Taken together they provide an interesting view of the discipline.

The second area zeroed in on one precise area of KO. Three paper focused on General Classification Schemes Almila Akdag Salah (Netherlands) and four other authors wrote on “The Evolution of Classification Systems: On-togeny of the UDC.” Thus the paper deals with change over the entire life of UDC. In doing so, the authors dem-onstrate the stability of main classes. With major changes driven by 20th century scientific development, there is a vast increase in the complexity of auxiliaries. Changes over the main classes and the auxiliaries over time are revealed In another paper, Joe Tennis (United States) provided “Facts and Fugit Tempus: Considering Time’s Effect on Faceted Classification Schemes.” Two types of change were identified–ecological change and lexical change. Ex-amples were taken from various editions of the Colon Classification. The problem and challenge are identified. The method of analysis is described and findings pre-sented. Three levels of analysis were found. In the third paper, B.A. Sharada (India) spoke on “Rangathan’s Colon Classification: Kanada-English Version ‘dwibindu vargii-karaNa’. The author looked at Kanada, a major Indian lan-guage and the uploading of a CC version on the web. The

small number of presentation of on classification per se is representative of the change of research interest in knowl-edge organization in general and in ISKO in particular.

Six papers were presented under the heading Knowl-edge Organization for the Digital Environment. Caro-lyn Watters and Naureen Nizam (Canada) presented a pa-per on “Knowledge Organization on the Web: the Emer-gent Role of Social Classification.” The authors focus on the difficulties of searching caused by the current structure of the web and its extremely diverse content “from blogs and photos to research articles and news videos.” The fo-cus in particular is on user driven tagging, in building knowledge of web content. Tag clouds are featured. The authors also make suggestions for future work. Included are a) an integration of two navigational tools (tag cloud and search) to allow users to search within a tag or select multiple tags within a tag cloud or to select multiple tags within a tag; b) by allowing users to select a tag from a list of recommended tags rather than always creating a new tag; and c) providing a tool guide navigations choices or recommendations from friends in the users social network. Cristina Pattuelli and Sara Rubinow (United States) dis-cussed “Charting DBpedia: Towards a Cartography of a Major Linked Dataset.” It provides an analysis of the data-set of the system named DBpedia. Two methods of ex-traction are described as is the sematic structure. The on-tology and the knowledge representation tools of the sys-tem identified and described. The analysis revealed a new type of knowledge representation environment. “There is a constant state of flux where different descriptive and classification approaches are employed concurrently (p. 75).” They further state that this analysis opens up a new area of research to which the knowledge organization community can make a significant contribution. Christo-pher Khoo et al. approached “Subject Organization in Three Types of Information Resources.” It is an explora-tory study of books, (i.e. monographs), web directories and information web sites. Twelve subjects were selected in the areas of science, arts, humanities and social science. The top two levels were of hierarchical subject organization were harvested and analyzed. Previous studies are identi-fied and the research method described. The sample stud-ied is small and could not reveal generalizations but the re-sults were “suggestive” (p. 88). A large-scale systematic study is needed. In the fourth paper in this section, Kalvi Mahesh and Pallavi Karanth (India) described “A Novel Knowledge Organization Scheme for the Web: Superlinks with Semantic Roles.” The authors set out six principles of knowledge organization and analyze them in terms of the divergent needs of knowledge organization in traditional and web-based applications. In doing so they summarized the knowledge organization requirements of web-based e-commerce. Further work is needed to solve the challenges


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of engineering large-scale solutions based on this frame-work. In a fifth paper Gercina Ángela Borém de Oliveira Lima (Brazil) described “Conceptual Modeling of Hyper-texts: Methodological Proposal for the Management of Semantic Content in Digital Libraries.” This paper focused on the continuation of the hypertext map prototype im-plementation–MHTX proposed by the author in 2004. It builds on that research. The paper describes the objectives and methodology and indicates the findings. There are three goals in the research. These were: a. to achieve sim-plification of information organization access and process in academic digital libraries; b. aims at contributing to the development of research on semantic organization of texts based on cognitive analysis and technological application and c. to encourage interdisciplinary research in the inte-gration of information science with areas such as com-puter science, cognitive science, linguistics and education. The final paper in this group, “The Precision of Metaphor for Information Retrieval” by Evelyn Orrico, Vera Dode-bei, and Miriam Gontijo (Brazil) is a “theoretical model for an information retrieval filter based on metaphors” (p. 103). It is based on principles set out by Grice (1975), Ber-rendonner (1989) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Ranganathan’s faceted system (1967). It is a case study us-ing a group of researchers in the field of transport engi-neering together with an analysis of manifestos written by a group of contemporary artists. Background is provided, along with the objective in context, and the theoretical-methological framework and the case study. The authors conclude that their model is feasible but further study on other fields of knowledge is needed.

Three papers were presented on Knowledge Organi-zation as a Navigation Tool. Charles-Antoine Julien, John E. Leide and Catherine Guastavino (Canada) and Pi-erre Tirilly (United States) wrote on “Using the LCSH Hi-erarchy to Browse a Collection.” They describe the difficul-ties of doing this and propose a different method to facili-tate LCSH browsing as well as information retrieval. In doing so they briefly cite previous research and offer an automated method to reduce LCSH structure, verify the presence of LCSH structures, provide some mitigating solutions to these issues and confirm the presence of a power law distribution of information within LCSH struc-ture. The structure is described as is the method used, in-cluding the data and extracting of the LCSH strings from bibliographic records, the matching with the authority and the matching of orphans. Based on the study they provide some guidelines for those wishing to develop an LCSH-based collection browsing tool. Continuing with hierarchies Pierre Tirilly (United States) and Charles-Antoine Julien (Canada) described “Random Walks for Subect Hierarchy Simplification.” They present a new method to simplify subject hierarchies based on a distribution of documents in

the collection of documents that it indexes, It simplifies the walk and provides better access for hierarchies of equal size. The final paper in this section is “Faceted Taxonomy as a Mechanism for Browsing and Accessing Digital Li-braries of Theses and Dissertations” by Benildes Coura Moriera dos Santos Mavculan and Gercina Ángela Borém de Oliveria Lima (Brazil), a case study to prioritize user in-formation needs in relation to digital libraries of these ma-terials.In the development of the study Ranganathsan’s facet analysis and content analysis and the application of the thematic categorical analysis technic was used.

In the fifth topic of the conference, Ontology, four papers were presented. Michael Shepherd and Tara Sam-palli (Canada) used the multidisciplinary topic the delivery of health care to address “Ontology as Boundary Object” The ontology is referred to is called SNOMED and is used to provide a bridge of interoperability fill the gap between members of multidisciplinary health team caring for pa-tients with chronic diseases. The paper describes the need for semantic interoperability in domain, describes SNOMED CT which was used to standardize terms. The ontology is outlined and applied. The results showed that “an ontology based on a controlled vocabulary, can effec-tively act as a boundary object among disciplines of health care.” Over all there was agreement among clinicians that this was helpful. A long-term evaluation is planned. In their paper, Flàvio Codeço Coelho, Renato Rocha Souza, and Claudia Torres Codeço (Brazil) described “Towards an Ontology for Mathematical Modeling With Application to Epidemiology.” They focused on mathematical models ap-plied to the natural science and as a case study the field of mathematical epidemiology was chosen for the ontology. The paper provides background methodology and results. “The ontology presented in the paper aims to fill a void in the availability of a formal ontology for the classification of mathematical models on natural systems” (p. 142). T. Padmavathi and M. Krishnamurthy (India) wrote on “On-tological Representation of Knowledge for Developing In-formation Services in Food Science and Technology.” This domain is very complex and the access to the databases is being challenged and this system is a framework for a large database on this subject. This paper is a lead-in to further work using the OWL-DL as the ontology as the develop-ment language and Protégé-OWL as the implementation tool. Sangeeta Deokattey, D.K. Dixit and K Bhanumurthy (India) addressed “Co-word and Facet Analysis as Tools for Conceptualization in Ontologies.” It is a preliminary study of a micro-domain. A test blanket module, taken from material on thermonuclear reactors was used and downloaded from the INIS database for the study. The search history was described and results analysed.

In the sixth section, Categories in Knowledge Or-ganization, there were three papers. L. Hajibayova and


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E.K. Jacob (United States) described “A Theoretical Framework for Operationalizing Basic Level Categories in Knowledge Organization Research.” In this paper the au-thors examined the work of authors, such as Rebecca Green, E. Rosch. Roger Brown and a number of others on the topic basic level categories. While A.Y. Asundi (India) analyzed the “Epistemological Basis of Some Common Categories” through “A Study of Space and Time as Common Concepts.” Asundi indicated common categories in library classification have been extensively examined by both Eric de Grolier and Ranganathan both of whom have indicated that there is room for further comparative study. Hence “this paper presents some unified approaches to space and time categories and in this context seeks their epistemological basis” (p. 166). In a second paper in this category by Asundi (India) discusses “Domain Specific Categories and Relations and their Potential Applications.” This is a “Case Study of Two Arrays of Agriculture Schedule of Colon Classification.” In this case thematic re-lations both inside and outside the schedules are examined in a process similar to that used in the previous paper.

The seventh topic of the conference entitled Relation-ships in Knowledge Organization was one of the larg-est categories including seven papers. K.S. Raghavan and A Neelameghan (India) presented “Indic Cultures and Con-cepts: Implications for Knowledge Organization.” It deals with the impact of culture, in particular indigenous cul-tures, on conceptualization and semantic relationships. Concepts in performing arts, mythology and humanities were examined. Eduardo Ismael Murguia and Rodrigo de Sales (Brazil) presented a paper on “CNPq’s Knowledge Area Table as a Knowledge and Power Apparatus.” (CNPq is the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). Maja Žumer (Slovenia) Marcia Lei Zeng and Joan S. Mitchell (United States) addressed “FRBRizing KOS Relationships.” That is, they discussed the application of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model to investigate the relationships in various versions of the Dewey Decimal Classification. In a case study the authors identified 6 questions regarding the relations and applied them to DDC versions (in particular the 22nd edition). The relationships focused on the term “work.” As a complex system DDC presented numerous opportunities and challenges in the research. This is part of long-term research and there still are many questions to be answered. Building on the past, D. Grant Campbell (Canada) focused on “Farradane’s Relational Indexing and Its Relationship to Hyperlinking in Alzheimer’s Information.” Using Far-radane’s indexing principles and web-based information the hyperlinks of three health information websites were examined to see how well the linking relationships mapped to Farradane’s relational operators.as well as to the linking attributes in HTML 5. The author found that Farradane’s

matrix of relational indexing “is an unlikely candidate for encoding of relational attributes in hyperlinks and there-fore unlikely to make any great difference to web design … as a means of analysis of Web practice, however, it has sur-prising relevance” (p. 200). Elizabeth Milonas (United States) presented a paper on “Classifying Web Term Rela-tionships: An Examination of the Search Result Pages of Two Major Search Engines.” Four separate single term searches were conducted in Yahoo and Google. Thus four search terms from two search engines were in the study. Two methods were used to organize the results—search result pages (or categories) and result page terms (RPTs). The terms were grouped by thesaural relationships—(equivalence, hierarchical and associative). One hundred terms were analysed using the Merriam Webster Dictionary definitions and their relationships identified on the basis of these definitions. Rosa San Sengundo and Daniel Martinez Avila (Spain) examined “New Conceptual Structures for the Digital Environment: From KOS to the Semantic In-terconnection” This paper examines the various factors in the general nature of the digital environment and its com-ponents and interconnections. In the final presentation in this group, A. Neelameghan and K.S. Raghavan provided a discussion of the “Concept of ‘Time,’ Semantic Relation-ships and Cultural Frames.” The authors state that “the ob-jective of this paper is to briefly discuss the impact of cul-ture on the formation of concepts about ‘Time,’ interrela-tionship among concepts and their representation in knowledge organization tools (KOTS) especially dealing with multilingual and muli-cultural knowledge resources” (p. 212). They describe their concept of time, followed by time in Indic cultures. From there they move to time repre-sentation in Space/Architecture and finally to the Sami concept of time. The latter is time as it is understood in Lapland. At the end of the paper they set out issues to be considered in designing Knowledge organization tools.

Six papers were presented each on Knowledge Or-ganization for a speciifc domain. Laurence Favier and Widad Mustafa El Hadi (France) presented “From Text to Image: The Concept of Universality in Knowledge Or-ganization System Designed by Paul Otlet and Interna-tional Institute of Bibliography.” It examines universalism as defended by Otlet as an aspect of his Universalist image documents They focus particularly on two elements of his theory—text and image documents. They compare Otlet’s approach with the challenges of universal search of the internet age. Kathryn La Barre (United States) and Rosa Inés de Novais Cordeiro (IBrazil) presented “Unmasking ‘That Obscure Object of Desire:’ a Brief Report from the Films and Facts Project.” This project project dealt with the use of facet analysis as an analytical tool for identifying sa-lient access features of moving images. The findings of this project indicate that there is value in exploring ways to


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continue augmenting controlled vocabulary, possibly by ex-tension with subject terms from folksonomies. Hemalata Iyer and Amber D’Ambrosio (United States) reflected on “Archetypes, Idealized Cognitive Models and Prototype Ef-fect: A Discussion of Images and Cognition in Categoriza-tion.” It used illustrations from historical children’s litera-ture and considers the pitfalls and challenges inherent in selecting prototypes of images for use in web-based re-sources, children’ catalogues and databases. The paper ends with a focus on the cautious approaches to be taken in the process. Joâo Batista Ernesto de Moraes wrote on “About-ness in Fiction: Methodological Perspectives for Knowledge Organization.” The author points out that the methodol-ogy applied to scientific texts is not suitable for fiction. He proposes the use of the Generative Trajectory of Meaning postulated by A.J. Greimas as a “contribution” in the iden-tification of aboutness in narrative works of fiction Fur-ther studies on larger texts, such as romances, are needed. Shu-Jiun Chen and Hsueh-hua Chen (Taiwan) and Marcia Lei Zeng (United States) considered the “Alignment of Conceptual Structures in Controlled Vocabularies in the Domain of Chinese Art.” It a discussion of issues and pat-terns. It is based on a sub-project entitled the Chinese ATT-Taiwan Project. The findings are related to semantic interoperability of multilingual KOS. Miriam Gontijo, Vera Dodebel and Evelyn Orrico (Brazil) discussed “Discourse Analysis as an Approach to Categorizing the Domain of Public Policy: The Case of Brazilian E-Government.” The authors the theoretical foundations of the Critical Dis-course Analysis (CDA) to justify the way an ontology is built to represent the area identified as a public policy. The objective was to contribute to the fields of information and computer science and to contribute to knowledge rep-resentation and organization through the construction of an ontology. Together these papers demonstrate knowl-edge organization from different angles.

A recent addition to the field is Knowledge Organiza-tion For Archives a category in which there were papers. Renato Rocha Sousa, Flàvio Codeço Coelho and Suemi Higuchi prepared a paper on “The CPDOC Semantic Por-tal Applying Semantic and Knowledge Organization Sys-tems to the Brazilian Contemporary Domains.” The pro-ject involves the use of semantic and visualization tech-nologies and natural language processing techniques in or-der to allow enhanced methods for accessing CIDOC files. Natália Bolfarini Tognoli and José Augusto Chaves Gui-marães (Brazil), addressed the “Challenges of Knowledge Representation in Contemporary Archival Science.” Archi-val science is now rethinking its theoretical and methodo-logical nineteenth century bases to be able to deal with contemporary archival knowledge production. This paper aims at a theoretical discussion of archival representation, specifically archival description in the face of changes to

deal with changes and proposals faced by contemporary archival science in the context of production, organization, and representation. Thiago Henrique Bragato Barros and João Batista Ernesto de Moraes (Brazil) described “Archi-val Classification and Knowledge Organization: Theoreti-cal Possibilities for the Archival Field.” The purpose of this paper was to outline a possible relationship between archival classification and knowledge organization theory. In the process the authors construct a parallel comparing the classification concepts in both areas and analyzing these concepts. In the final paper of this section Pekka Henttonen (Finland) addressed “Diversity of Knowledge Organization in Records and Archives Management.” The paper suggests that there are four salient differences: 1. what knowledge organization systems there are to achieve the goal of records and archives management; 2. what the moment is when the systems are applied to organize the information; 3. what is the granularity of the actions is that the KOS supports: and 4. how the KOS is combined with the work of organization of record processes. Each of these aspects is explored. These differences need to be considered in relation to the whole environment. The problem is that the current literature tends to deal a par-ticular RAM (records and archives management). There is a need to be able to deal with the differences across bor-ders.

Under the topic Design and Development of Knowledge Organization Tools there were 5 papers. Leonard Will (United Kingdom) reported on “The ISO 25964 Data Model for the Structure of an Information Re-trieval Thesaurus.” This discussion contains a data model for thesaurus structure. In the article the author describes the details of the concepts and relationships of the system. Weislaw Babik (Poland) described “A Faceted Classification Scheme of Cartographic Materials” and outlines the prob-lems of its construction and use. In the paper he explains Ranganathan’s ideas as they pertain to this particular tool and explains the construction of the system. In future the system will be adjusted to new capabilities offered by the Internet. Yuan Ming-Shu, Nan Fan-Hua and Lee Gou-Chi (Taiwan) carried out an empirical study on “Constructing Knowledge Classification Scheme in Industrial Technology via Domain Analysis.” Three approaches were used in the study—special classifications, terminological studies and bibliometrics—to construct a classification scheme of the fishing industry. This resulted in suggestions for further study. B.L. Vinod Kumar and Khaiser Nikam (India) spoke on a “Sanskrit-English Bilingual Thesaurus for Yogic Sci-ences.” It was a case study of problems and issues with terms of Non-Latin-origin. A thesaurus is being con-structed using digital library software at a university in Bangalore. The features of the thesaurus are briefly listed and problems and issues identified. The design is briefly


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discussed and an example given. In the final paper in this group Emilena Josemary Lorenzon (and six other Brazilian authors) presented a brief paper on “Controlled Vocabu-lary used in Intelligence Information System for Shoes.” This is a discussion of a controlled vocabulary developed for a system referred to as InfoSIC. The vocabulary used was originally categorized and based on divisions provided by the CRG (Classification Research Group).

A group of three papers dealt with Information Min-ing: Automatic Indexing. In past years this topic has drawn a somewhat larger group of papers. It seems that the topic now draws less interest. Flãvio Codeço Coelho (and three other Brazilian authors) presented a paper on “Information Mining and Visualization of Data from the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF).” This paper is joint re-search in the form of a case study prepared by a law school and an applied math school and deals with judicial activities in some Brazilian courts. The analysis is described and the paper is referred to by the authors as a “pioneering” piece of work on large scale analysis. The hope is that the rich-ness of the data set is sufficient basis for further study. Carlos Alberto Corrêa and Nair Yumiko Kobashi (Brazil) made a presentation entitled “Automatic Indexing and In-formation Visualization” This paper is a study based on paraconsistent logic. This type of logic is explained by the authors as a logic that “attempts to deal with contradic-tions concerned with studying and developing inconsis-tency-tolerant systems of logic” (p. 326). Its flexibility goes beyond the dichotomies of yes and no and results better than traditional methods. The system is explained and ap-plied. The research required interaction among different disciplines—information retrieval automatic indexing, non-classical logic and information visualization. Further ex-periments need to be carried out to broaden the under-standing of the detected effects. Nalini Raja (India) ad-dressed the topic “Digitized Content and Index Pages as Alternative Subject Access Fields.” This was a pilot study to test the benefits of digitized content and index pages of books and the content pages of journals to provide access to documents in a collection. A pilot study was carried out to test for documents on four subjects—leadership, women entrepreneurs, disinvestment and digital preserva-tion - using information stored in MARC21 fields of bib-liographic records.

The final group of 5 papers offered at the conference dealt with Users and Context. Carol L. Tilley and Kath-

ryn A. La Barre (United States) raised the question “What if they build it and no one comes?” The authors discuss the problem of a chasm between information-seeking be-haviour and the design of information systems “Balancing Full-Text and User Tasks” the state that prohibits an effec-tive resolution of information seeking problems. Their pa-per discusses the task analysis findings from a research project entitled Folktales and Facets and endeavours to ad-dress this chasm. A task analysis is conducted on tran-scripts from interviews on 12 subjects and the findings are mapped to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) in the context of user studies that seek to do the same. A paper by Sholeh Arastoopoor and Rahmatollah Fattahi (Iran) was entitled “Users’ Perception of About-ness and Ofness in Images” is an approach to subject in-dexing based on Ervin Panofsky’s theory and users views. The theory and methodology are explained. Melodie J. Fox (United States) addressed “Communities of Practice, Gen-der and Social Tagging,” in order to explore whether lin-guistic variations in tagging are influenced more by gender or context. The author analyses the quality of tags used in LibraryThing. This study seeks to dismantle stereotypical views of women’s language use and to suggest a commu-nity of practice-based approach to analysing social tags. Gender was not shown to be an influential factor in how users tag. A community of practice framework is preferred. However further exploration and a larger sample size are needed to determine to what extent the community has linguistic variation in the online environment. In the final paper in this group Radia Bernaoui (Algeria) and Mo-hamed Hassoun (France) analysed “User Expectations, Re-ality and Delineation of Agricultural Information Systems in the Maghreb.” An information system for agriculture is being developed in Algeria based on user needs. The sys-tem will use FAO’s AGROVOC as its basis and will be multilingual. This paper outlines some of the search inter-face and vocabulary using a survey of potential end users.

The proceedings indicate that this was a truly interesting conference. Solid in-depth papers came from former ISKO members but there were participants from countries who had not previously participated in ISKO and who had much to offer. Some new and interesting approaches were presented. “Relationships” was a word frequently referred to throughout the conference.


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Reprinted from International Classification: Journal on theory and practice of universal and special classification systems and the-sauri = Zeitschrift zur Theorie und Praxis universaler und spe-zialler Klassifikationssyteme und Thesauri. Vol. 2 (1975) No. 1. The masthead identifies the “editors” as: Ingetraut Dahl-berg, Alwin Diemer, Arashanipalal Neelameghan and Jean M. Perreault. Emphasis is as in the original.

Ingetraut Dahlberg Frankfurt, BRD

The Terminology of Subject-fields*

* Paper presented at the Symposium on International Co-operation in Terminology, Vienna, 9-11 April 1975

Dahlberg, I.: The terminology of subject-fields. In: Intern. Classificat. 2 (1975) No. 1, p. 31-37. So far terminological work has been mainly directed to-wards defining very special concepts. The more general ones, e.g. those denoting subject-fields have been neglected with the result that communication on this level has been seriously hampered. There exists a great number of such terms and also a growing trend for the formation of new ones. In the FRG an R&D project was started in 1972 with the collection of names of subject fields, it is intended to assemble their definitions in a dictionary and to build a general concept system by computercomparison of their characteristics as provided by their definitions. The nature of subject-fields is explained, details on the German collec-tion are given as well as some results from a formal analysis of their concepts. It is proposed to initiate similar projects in other linguistic regions as well; this could be done under the auspices of Infoterm. Some application-possibilities for a general concept-system (e. g. a broad system of or-dering) are given. The annex displays a scheme of 9 subject areas and about 90 subareas for the sorting of names of subject fields. (Author) 1. Introductory remarks One of the interesting features of human development in history is the fact that a continuing movement towards more abstract and more compound wording and thinking can be observed. This is an ontogenetic as well as a phy-logenetic characteristic of mankind. Such a develop-

ment can also be noticed in the abstract terms denoting fields of knowledge: the septem artes liberales et mecha-nicae of the early medieval ages developed into the scien-tific disciplines and the socalled arts of the ages of en-lightenment, which are still with us and can be recognized in the structure of our universities. However, in the last few decades a remarkable integrative process has taken place. The former disciplines of more or less monolithic structure and comparable to the pillars of the temple of Salomo—as done by the Vienna librarian J. M. Denis (1729-1800)1 (in referring to the seven pillars of wisdom) —have not only been split up into many subdisciplines but have also been used as aspect sciences in the investi-gation of special objects. At one time, e.g. there was just the phenomen of ‘soil’ and the knowledge about soil cal-led ‘pedology’. Now we find the following aspect-fields connected with soil as e.g.

Soil-physics, soil-mechanics, soil-chemistry, soil-mineralogy, soil-biology, soil-biochemistry, soil-engineering, soil-classification.

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Formerly, there was just mathematics, biology, statistics. Now there is biomathematics, biometrics, biostatistics, etc. Kedrov2 notices that this phenomenon of a “synthesis of the sciences” may be explained as a “synthesis by cementa-tion, —by fundamentalization and—by pivotization.”

The creation, in this manner, of new concepts and their terms as required by the necessity of assigning na-mes to the proliferating new fields of research and/or human developing activities is an everyday experience.

Based on the observation (in scanning e. g. the indexes of directories of documentation centers, special libraries, organizations and research institutes) that this develop-ment has led to the creation of a great many synonyms and to a lack of clarity concerning the contents and sco-pe of meaning of such terms, it was felt necessary to round up, on a suitable occasion, all field-names existing in the German language and to study the construction laws of such terms and definitions. We had the intention of thereby also uncovering the relationships between their underlying concepts and of providing the means for establishing on this basis, a macro-thesaurus or a broad system of ordering. A research project thus was started in 1972, and some reports on the first phase of this project have since then been published3.

From the collection of about 7000 thus rounded up field-names we were able to deduct that a respective the-saurus of the conventional (i.e. alphabetical kind) could not be created, since most of the terms denoted compos-ite concepts and consisted of more than one verbal con-stituent. There were only about 1000 oneword field-names against some 6000 composite terms (e.g. biology vs soil-biology) and a closer look at the components re-vealed that most of them were recurrent rather than uni-que, which meant that a faceted scheme of concepts would probably be the best solution for the combining of existing and also future subject-field names.

The experiences from our investigations are hereby re-ported to this Symposium on International Co-operation in Terminology for two reasons: 1) to attract attention to the existent and growing trend in

forming terms denoting subject-fields and 2) to encourage similar collections and investigations as

done for the German language also in other languages in order that bases for comparisons of such terms resp. their concepts in different languages can be created.

It is of course not sufficient to only collect such terms; the definitions of their concepts are needed as well. No com-parison concerning contents must ever be carried out on the basis of words only or of what one assumes a term to be about. The only objective basis are definitions as found in dictionaries and encyclopedias (usually drafted by experts of

a field) or as given by institutions or societies having them-selves created such new terms for their field of interest. 2. The nature of a subject-field Before tackling the terminology of subject-field names, it seems appropriate to say a few words on the nature of subject-fields, especially since the conceptual contents of a subject-field is usually reflected in the name of that field. A science has one [sic] been defined by A. Diemer4 as being

“a system of statements/propositions on a certain area which are interconnected in relations of foun-dation and which are complying with the postulate of truth, and which by virtue of such a foundation become ‘scientifically meaningful’ propositions.”

Since a science may therefore be regarded as a system of propositions on a certain area, one may conclude that the definition of a given science should reveal the range of objects or the one single object of interest to that science as well as the kind of activities applied to the object(s) concerned. The definition or perhaps also the defining name of a science may then be regarded as the hierarchi-cally highest-level proposition from among the entire sys-tem of propositions forming that one science.

In some cases, besides the attainment of knowledge about objects and activities corresponding, also an attain-ment of knowledge about specific goals is regarded as tasks and functions of a science. We should like to refer to all those sciences concerned with the conscious change of man’s environment and world, as in the policy-sciences and technologies.5

Besides the well-established sciences conforming to the above definition there are knowledge fields which may be regarded as sciences in an early stage6, characterized by names which reflect the aforementioned components (ob-jects and activities), e.g.

cancer research, space technology, plant nutrition, an-thropometry, adult education, road construction

Such knowledge fields may be called subject-fields if their subjects have become an identifiable concern of a certain group of people. Thus an FID Working Group for the purposes of establishing a Subject-field Reference Code (SRC) defined a subject -field as

“a recognized range of activities around one or more subjects where recognition is based on criteria such as -a number of people active in this field -documents being produced -a special terminology existing or being established”7



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In selecting possible and relevant terms for a collection of names of such subject-fields, the criterion that at least these two components (object and activity) should be re-cognizable—either in the names themselves or through the definitions of their concepts—has proven to be a va-lid and practical guide8. A syntactical analysis of the rela-tionship between the two components of such terms showed that they—so to speak—condition each other just like subject and predicate within a sentence. Actually, each of the composite terms could be transformed into a passive voice sentence. Since these terms therefore in-clude a microform of a sentence they have elsewhere been called ‘microsentences’9. Others, like e.g. Negulaev (14) call them ‘elementary statements’.

The combination of specific subjects with terms de-noting disciplines, like ‘marine geology’, ‘cyto-chemistty’, ‘occupational sociology’ to form new subject-fields can be seen as being of this same kind of combination, since the discipline terms (geology, chemistry, sociology) bring into the combination in each case the method used for the investigation of a respective object/subject, thus tak-ing over the role of the predicate of the microsentence involved. Concludingly one may perhaps say that a sub-ject-field is a (cultural) phenomenon emerging out of human practical, intellectual and/or mental activities re-garding the investigation and/or change of nature and natural phenomena as well as the emanations and prod-ucts resulting out of the activities of man and society themselves. It demands recognition by society through ei-ther of the criteria mentioned above. 3. Some details on the collection of subject-field

terms In order to attain an overall view of the kind and multi-tude of subject-field terms in the German language some 13 sources were exploited in 1972, most of them refer-ence books (like directories of documentation centers, research institutes, libraries, scientific journals, scientific and technical societies and associations, economic or-ganizations etc.)10; from these altogether 5600 terms have been identified as denoting subject-fields and listed in a card-file as well as on magnetic tape. In 1973 the “Fächerkatalog” was scanned too and another 1200 names went into our files. We are just now searching the new edition of the “Vademecum deutscher Lehr- und Forschungsstätten” which in 1972 already had proved to be the most voluminous single source, yielding more than 2000 subject-field terms (in addition to the 2000 which we already had assembled from other sources), it appears that we might get another 1200 to 1500 from the new edition. For each relevant term two preprinted thesaurus cards were filled out to assist in the necessary organized

input for computer processing. Of the very first 5600 terms two printouts were generated, one for the alpha-betical and permuted listing of the terms and their com-ponents and one showing a very rough grouping accord-ing to approx 40 areas of knowledge.

In addition to the printouts not containing indications of source and available definitions two cardfiles were es-tablished, an alphabetic one and a systematic one; for the latter the structure was used which has been suggested since 197112 for a new organization of knowledge and which also went into the proposal for a structure for the Subject-field Reference Code (or Broad System of Order-ing) of the FID. (The main divisions for subjectareas—based on existing object areas and corresponding to them—as well as their subareas are given in the Annex 1.)

It seems to us that the same methods could be used if such collections should be created for other languages as well, exploiting similar reference works of other lan-guages, with the exception, however, of, grouping the terms selected according to the more balanced and de-tailed subdivisions as shown in Annex 1.

4. Some results from a formal analysis

of subject-field concepts In an earlier, German publication on knowledge fields and their names10 we gave some statistics on the kind of terms and term-combinations denoting subject-fields, indicating that the largest group in the German language was of the kind ‘object (or phenomen) + discipline name’ as e. g. ‘soil-physics’, ‘soil-chemistry’. Another larger group was formed by terms of the kind ‘adjective + discipline’ as e. g. ‘bio-logical chemistry’, ‘chemical technology’, where the adjec-tive denotes either a discipline itself or may also be of a general character like ‘applied’, ‘analytical’, ‘special’ etc. The one-word terms such as ‘anatomy” ‘acoustics’, ‘ethics’ and the like, ranged in the secondlast position while the small-est group was of the ‘discipline—specification’ kind, as e. g. ‘physics of glasses’, ‘hydrology of flood control’, ‘sociol-ogy of education’; such terms are even rarer in the English language. But this latter group is actually only another form of the kind as mentioned as the largest group. It may de-pend very much on lingual use: thus the German ‘Physik der festen Erde’ corresponds to the English ‘solid earth geophysics’ and the German ‘Freizeit-Soziologie’ to the English ‘sociology of leisure’.

We also looked for the kinds of concepts occurring in com binations of field names. For this reason we analysed the concepts and their relations of either objects, proc-esses, phenomena or properties or combinations out of these. We spoke of object-related concepts or objectconcepts whenever an object was meant, like a chemical ele-ment, a plant, an organization, a piece of art. Whenever an


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activity was meant, as e.g. evaluation, control, measure-ment, we spoke of process-concepts and equally, whenever a phenomenon was meant, like rain-fall, traffic, radiation, of phenomen-concepts and whenever a property was meant, like elasticity, solubility, weight, etc. we spoke of a property-concept. Combinations with these different kinds of concepts may simply be called combination concepts, however one distinction may be made: whenever an object- or a phenomenon-concept is combined with a process-concept then the case may be called to be a conjunct con-cept, like e. g. temperature measurement or flood control. Here we again find the microsentences from above since such terms can be transformed into passive-voice sen-tences like ‘temperature is measured’, ‘flood is controlled’. The two components condition each other and thus may be looked at as forming a conjunction, a concept-conjunction.

Though we have not as yet statistically evaluated the entire collection of subject-field terms regarding amounts of kinds of concepts in the combinations occurring, we did look into the combinations occuring with the Ger-man morphemes

-kunde -wesen -lehre -wissenschaft -technik

Since ‘Technik’ in German is used in at least two senses (Technik I as the application aspect for something, Tech-nik II as the processing aspect) we distinguished these as-pects in our counting, too.

Table 1 shows the combination frequencies, with phe-nomenon-concepts and property-concepts being counted together.

The figures relate to a total number of 6800 names of subject fields. Interesting here are the high usage fre-quencies of -kunde, -wesen and -lehre as against -wissenschaft, since there is no equivalent for the first three in either the English nor the French language. It is also apparent that the morpheme -kunde is used mostly

with objectconcepts/terms, whereas -technik II occurs usually with process-related con-

cepts; technik I again is preferably combined with ob-ject-concepts.

Such ending morphemes would also be used in connec-tion with combination-concepts11. Although such statis-tics of term combinations may look a little odd, they are, however, quite useful for the establishment of principles for an overall facted system of such concepts. They may also be used to gain some insight into the formation rules for subject-field names.

Combinations of terms with -kunde, -wesen and -lehre are peculiar for the German language. They may have their origin in the 17th century, when German scho-lars tried to translate their Latin forms and thus created in addition to them German equivalents12 which later hel-ped as models for the creation of new terms. The Ger-man language therefore has many more synonyms for these terms, and sometimes the former equivalents are given different meanings in order to distinguish between the more scientific and the more practical approach, like in Medizin vs Heilkunde. But whereas the English lan-guage only speaks of

veterinary medicine the German language proliferates with Tier-Medizin, TierHeilkunde, Veterinär-Medizin and there is as well Gerichtliche Tiermedizin, Gerichtliche Tierheilkunde und Gerichtliche Veterinanuedizin. In addition there is also Veterinarwesen, Staatsveterinarkunde as well as An-gewandte Staats-Veterinännedizin. In English the follow-ing endings occur more frequently:

-ology as in pharmacology -ics as in therapeutics -nomy as in astronomy -graphy as in reprography -metry as in biometry -scopy as in spectroscopy



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but these correspond to similar German endings and one can observe the framing of new field-terms today along these lines, also perhaps in order to find similar names in German and English for the same concepts. One of the latest creations seems to be “Environtologie”13.

Although in each of the above endings a specific mea-ning is involved, this does not mean that the specific meaning remains consistent throughout all of its possible applications. Usually, however, -ology means ‘the science’, ‘the teaching of and -ics (from the Greek ending –xi means ‘similar to’, ‘belonging, pertaining to’, somewhat like the German -wesen, that is, ‘all things having some-thing to do with …’ e. g. a certain object or activity. 5. Further work and further plans From the very beginning of our project “Ordnungssystem der Wissensgebiete” we realized that the definitions of the terms denoting fields of knowledge would play a crucial role insofar as the elements of such definitions would dis-play the characteristics of the respective concepts. Only by identifying these characteristics one may recognize the rela-tionships between concepts, which in tum are necessary for the co.nstruction of concept systems.

When the project. was granted’ 1972, however, only terms were to be collected,110 mentioning of definitions was felt necessary, Meanwhile another research project has been formulated leading a) to a dictionary of subject-field terms and b) to a computerized matching of the de-finitions from this dictionary in order that the computer may reveal the conceptual system behind the terms in question. One may perhaps ask where the definitions should come from. Partly they may be found in the dic-tionaries and encyclopedias but most of them will have to be traced back through the sources of their mention-ing, and the scientists concerned must be asked directly. This may not always be possible. For the rest of the cases one would therefore have to ask experts for new defini-tions and for advice regarding the abandoning of terms or their labelling as probable synonyms or perhaps even as out-of-date terms.

All of this work has to be documented and to be en-tered into a preliminary dictionary which should be made available in alphabetical and systematic arrangement to many experts for critical comments and selection of most appropriate terms and definitions in cases of choice.

The next step with regard to the terminological work would then be to edit an approved dictionary of subject-field terms and definitions. This may be a help for similar projects in other languages.

There would, of course, be other applications of such dictionaries, e. g, the creation of a broad system of order-ing, but this cannot be entered in here.

6. International cooperation concerning subject-field terms

It would be extremely valuable for the further work regard-ing the problems involved in naming fields of knowledge if an international body like the Unesco or Infoterm could be interested in helping to create the organizational frame-work for the support of this work, both on the interna-tional as well as on the national level(s). Any international work needs national support, but here we also need the stimulation from the international part in order that na-tional work may be started. Besides the international rec-ognition of the necessity of a tool like a multilingual dic-tionary of subject-field terms it seems therefore necessary that different nations or language groups be encouraged to undertake similar projects to the one started for the Ger-man language. So far in some countries macrothesauri are being constructed14 and some people seem to consider this task as equivalent to the one outlined. However, thesauri usually do not contain definitions and thus they cannot be as explicit as terminological dictionaries, while on the other hand such macrothesauri do not only contain terms denot-ing subject-fields but also terms for objects, processes, etc.; the terms are not checked against criteria as given in sec-tion 2 of this paper.

For reasons of comparability of results it would be ad-visable, therefore, to take care that input as well as methods are described well enough so that such descriptions may serve as general guidelines for projects in specific lan-guages.

A small international board of terminologists (perhaps an “Infoterm Board on Subject-field Names”) should elaborate such guidelines and be given the authority to in-vite different nations or specific linguistic regions to under-take the respective research and development projects. Perhaps this might be done in the first place for English, French and Russian and later on in other languages too.

Judging from our experience it should take about half a year to get started and about one year for a list of about 5000 terms and their definitions to be presented as a computer printout.

The members of the Infoterm Board concerned should have direct contact with the project leaders of the different language projects to be able to give advice if questions should come up.

As soon as the first two natural language dictionaries of subject-field terms are available one may start the first multilingual dictionary of this sort by comparing the terms and definitions, and determine the equivalencies. Thus one dictionary after another has to be compared with the other ones and all the differences have to be do-cumented.


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This task should be done by a small permanent work-ing group since it involves hard work and probably con-stant contacts with scientists and experts. 7. Concluding remarks So far terminological task groups have mainly been busy with terms and definitions of very special concepts. The more general ones have been neglected with the result that communication on this level is seriously hampered and with it international co-operation as well.

There is one reason for such a terminological task, however, which should be even more convincing: there may not be a universal broad system of ordering unless we have an objective basis for its elaboration which would be agreed upon definitions of the concepts which it contains. Most of those who still have reservations against such a system base their arguments on the exist-ing differences in cultural developments of nations. But here we are concerned with scientific knowledge founded on verifiable and justifiable propositions. In this way the-re exists somehow an objective foundation for an ex-change of knowledge. We should at least try to overcome the obstacles still present, since—for a number of rea-sons—we badly need such a system: (1) as a tool for the exchange of information on the con-

tents of the fields named (2) as an intermediate lexicon to correlate different uni-

versal and special classification systems and thesauri (3) as a common terminology for national and interna-

tional statistics in many application fields, esp. also for statistics of research and development

(4) as a common tool for the ordering of contents of re-ference books and aids,

(5) as a basis for any internationally uniform assignment of book numbers/call numbers (Signaturen)

(6) as an indexing device for statements involving or about fields of knowledge.

It is my firm belief that we shall be able to elaborate this broad system of ordering. However, we ought to ap-proach this goal step by step, above all by first doing the necessary research work, by cleaning and clearing up the terminology involved.

It seems therefore a timely concern for Infoterm to realize the importance of this specific task and to settle the preliminaries for the organizational structure of an international dictionary of subject-field names and its re-sultant concept-system.

Notes 1. The 7 disciplines were: theology, medicine, jurispru-

dence, history, philosophy, mathematics and fine lit-erature (belles lettres).For the comparison see: M. Denis: Einleitung in die Biicherkunde.1. Teil, Biblio-graphie. Wien 1777. p. 262-3

2. See his contribution (1) where also the kinds of syn-theses are explained.

3. These may be found in (2), (3) and (4). 4. My own translation from (5) p.14, the German text:

“Wissenschaft ist ein Gesamt von Aussagen, die in einem Begründungszusammenhang stehen und am Wahrheitspostulat orientiert sind, und die durch die Begründung zu ‘wissenschaftlich sinnvollen’ Aus-sagen werden”. Prof. Diemer later added to this defi-nition “... on a certain area” (Uber einen bestimmten Gegenstandsbereich).

5. An ‘epistemological goal’ (Erkenntnisziei) was seen by R. Rochhausen (6) to exist in all those sciences con-cerned with theoretical and applied objectives. See al-so (7) p. 225-228 and p.210-211.

6. See K. Lewin (8), cited also in (7), p. 200-202. 7. This was the former definition of May 1973. In July

1973 this was slightly changed as can be seen from the annual report of FID/SRC of 1973.

8. Especially in the Fächerkatalog (9) we found many socalled disciplines like “oscillators”, “digital com-puters”, “elasticity”, etc., which are of course either objects or properties but no subject fields.

9. This was done in (7), p. 175. 10. They are listed in (2) and (3). 11. See (9); it contains about 2270 fields ordered in 88

larger groups.It contains only those fields being taught in German universities in the recent years. Right now a second edition is being prepared.

12. Actually since 1970 but then for the purpose of a to-tal revi sion of the UDC; see (11) and (12) (a slight modification has been introduced in (11)).

13. See (4) – a first linguistic evaluation of the collection. 14. In (4) a larger table shows the frequencies of these

combinations. 15. We should like to refer to Wolfgang Ratkes (1571-

1635) “Entwerfung einer All-Unterweisung” where he suggested e.g. the following translations: jurispruden-tia – Rechtslehr, Medicina – Arzneilehr, Philosophia – Vermmftlehr, etc. See also (7), p.305.

16. Thus in (10) p. 1138. 17. See e. g. M. Wolff-Terroine’s one as projected in (13).



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Literature (1) Kedrov, B.M.: Concerning the synthesis of the sci-

ences. In: Intern. Classificat. l (1974) No. 1, p. 3-11 (2) Dahlberg, I.: Projekt Ordnungssystem der Wissens-

gebiete. Phase I: Materialsammlung. AbschluB-bericht und Printouts. Frankfurt/ Deutsche Gesell-schaft fUr Dokumentation 1973. 24+205 p.

(3) Dahlberg, I.: Ordnungssystem der Wissensgebiete. Ergeb nisse und Erfahrungen aus Projektphase I. In: DK-Mitt. 17 (1973) No. 3, p.9-12

(4) Dahlberg, I.: Wissensgebiete und ihre Benennun-gen.In: Muttersprache 84 (1974) No. 6, p. 420-426

(5) Diemer, A.: Wissenschaft als aktuelles Problem.In: Jahrb.d. Univ. Düsseldorf 1970/71. Düsseldorf: Triltsch VerI. 1971

(6) Rochhausen, R.(Hrsg.): Die Klassifikation der Wis-senschaften als philosophisches Problem, – Berlin: Dt. Veri. d. Wissenschaften 1968. 158 p.

(7) Dahlberg, J.: Grundlagen universaler Wissensord-nung. Pullach b. Munchen: Verl. Dokumentation 1974. XVIII, 366 p.

(8) Lewin, K.: Uber Idee und Aufgabe der verglei-chenden Wissenschaftslehre. In: Symposium 1 (1927) p. 61-93

(9) Hochschulverband. Geschaftsstelle: Facherkatalog. Göttingen: VerI. O. Schwartz 1973. 207 p.

(10) Stiftcrverband flir die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Hrsg.): Vademecum deutscher Lehr- und Forschungsstatten. VI. neu. bearb.u. erw. Aufl. 1973.1248 p.

(11) Dahlberg, I.: Principles for the construction of a universal classification system. In: Wojciechowski, J.A. (Ed.): Conceptual basis of the classification of knowledge. Proc. Ottawa Conf., Oct. 1-5, 1971. München-Pullach: VerI. Dokumentation 1974. p. 450-471

(12) Dahlberg, t.: Moglichkeiten einer Neugestaltung der DK. – In: Nachr. Dok. 21 (1970) No.4, p. 143-151; in English: Possibilities for a new universal classifi-cation. In: J.Doc. 27 (1971) No.1, p. 18-36

(13) Wolff-Terroine, M.: A macrothesaurus. Why? How? – Paper presented at Third Intern. Study Conf. on Classification Research, Bombay 6-11 Jan. 1975.15 p.

(14) Negulaev, G. A.: Construction of a thesaurus of ele-mentary statements. In: Nau cn.-techn.Inform.SCI. 2 (1973) No. 5, p.8-15, 18 refs. (In Russian)


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Appendix


Books Recently Published

64

Books Recently Published

Mitchell, Erik. 2014. Metadata standards and Web Services in

Libraries, Archives, And Museums: An Active Learning Re-source. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.

Golub, Koraljka. 2014. Subject Access to Information: An In- terdisciplinary Approach. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.


Index to Volume 41 (2014)

65

Index to Volume 41 (2014) No. 1, pp. 1-100; No. 2, pp. 101-190,

No. 3, pp. 189-260; No. 4, pp. 261-337; No. 5, pp. 337-416; No. 6, pp. 417-473.

ALPHABETICAL INDEX 1. Articles Ahlam F. Sawsaa and Joan Lu. Using Natural Language Programming (NLP) Technology To Model Domain Ontology OTO by Extracting Occupational Therapy Concepts.................................................452 Ali Shiri. Making Sense of Big Data: A Facet Analysis Approach..........................................................357 Andreas Oskar Kempf, Dominique Ritze, Kai Eckert, and Benjamin Zapilko. New Ways of Mapping Knowledge Organization Systems: Using a Semi-Automatic Matching Procedure for Building up Vocabulary Crosswalks.................... 66 Antonio García Gutiérrez and Daniel Martínez-Ávila. Critical Organization of Knowledge in Mass Media Information Systems .....................................................................205 Antonio García Gutiérrez. Declassifying Knowledge Organization .............................................................393 Birger Hjørland. Is Facet Analysis Based on Rationalism? A Discussion of Satija (1992), Tennis (2008), Herre (2013), Mazzocchi (2013b), and Dousa & Ibekwe-SanJuan (2014)................................................369 Daniel Martínez-Ávila and Margaret E.I. Kipp. Implications of the Adoption of BISAC for Classifying Library Collections ....................................................377 David Zemmels. Accessing Virtual Social Worlds: A Unique Methodology for Research in New Media Spaces ..............................................................................................230 Elaine Ménard and Jonathan Dorey. TIIARA: A New Bilingual Taxonomy for Image Indexing .....................113 Elena Konkova, Ayşe Göker, Richard Butterworth, and Andrew MacFarlane. Social Tagging: Exploring the Image, the Tags, and the Game.............................................. 57 Emilia Currás. The Nature of Information and Its Influence in Human Cultures ........................................... 92 Fausto Giunchiglia, Biswanath Dutta, and Vincenzo Maltese. From Knowledge Organization to Knowledge Representation ....................................................... 44 Fernanda Ribeiro. The Use of Classification in Archives as a Means of Organization, Representation and Retrieval of Information .......................................................319

Gustavo Silva Saldanha. The Philosophy of Language and Knowledge Organization in the 1930s: Pragmatics of Wittgenstein and Ranganathan............................................... 296 Heather Lea Moulaison, Felicity Dykas, and John M. Budd. Foucault, the Author, and Intellectual Debt: Capturing the Author-Function Through Attributes, Relationships, and Events in Knowledge Organization Systems ..................................................................... 30 John Budd. Organizing Acts and Objects: Metaphysical Foundations ........................................................... 419 Katrin Weller. What do we get from Twitter—and What Not? A Close Look at Twitter Research in the Social Sciences ............................................................................... 238 M.P. Satija, Devika P. Madalli and Biswanath Dutta. Modes of Growth of Subjects ..................................................... 195 Magali Rezende Gouvêa Meireles, Beatriz Valadares Cendón, and Paulo Eduardo Maciel de Almeida. Bibliometric Knowledge Organization: A Domain Analytic Method Using Artificial Neural Networks................. 145 Marcia Lei Zeng, Karen F. Gracy and Maja Žumer. Using a Semantic Analysis Tool to Generate Subject Access Points: A Study Using Panofsky’s Theory and Two Research Samples................................................................. 440 Maria Aparecida Moura. Emerging Discursive Formations, Folksonomy and Social Semantic Information Spaces (SSIS): The Contributions of the Theory of Integrative Levels in the Studies carried out by the Classification Research Group (CRG) .................... 304 Marisa Bräscher. Semantic Relations in Knowledge Organization Systems.............................................. 175 Ole Olesen-Bagneux. The Memory Library: How the Library in Hellenistic Alexandria Worked..................... 3 Renata Cristina Gutierres Castanha and Maria Cláudia Cabrini Grácio. Bibliometrics Contribution to the Metatheoretical and Domain Analysis Studies .............. 171 Rick Szostak. Classifying for Social Diversity ........................... 160 Rick Szostak. Classifying the Humanities .................................. 263 Robert Losee. Combining High Metainformation with High Information Content: The Information-Metainformation Utility Hypothesis........................................... 123


Index to Volume 41 (2014)

66

Rodrigo De Santis and Rosali Fernandez de Souza. Classifying Popular Songs: Possibilities and Challenges ..........181 Rongying Zhao and Shengnan Wu. The Network Pattern of Journal Knowledge Transfer in Library and Information Science in China ..............................................276 Silvana Drumond Monteiro and Maria Aparecida Moura. Knowledge Graph and “Semantization” in Cyberspace: A Study of Contemporary Indexes .............................................429 Systems: Using a Semi-Automatic Matching Procedure for Building up Vocabulary Crosswalks ....................................... 66 Tanja Svarre and Marianne Lykke. Experiences with Automated Categorization in E-Government Information Retrieval...................................................................... 76 Tim Kenyon. Defining and Measuring Research Impact in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Creative Arts in the Digital Age ...............................................................................249 Vinod Kumar B.L. and Khaiser Nikam. Development of an Information Support System for Yogic Science using Knowledge Organization Systems....................................288 Virgínia Bentes Pinto, Camila Regina de Oliveira Rabelo, and Igor Peixoto Torres Girão. SNOMED-CT as Standard Language for Organization and Representation of the Information in Patient Records .......................................311 Vreda Pieterse and Derrick G. Kourie. Lists, Taxonomies, Lattices, Thesauri and Ontologies: Paving a Pathway Through a Terminological Jungle ...............217 Xiaoyue Ma and Jean-Pierre Cahier. An Exploratory Study on Semantic Arrangement of VDL-Based Iconic Knowledge Tags .................................................................. 14 Zhao Youlin, José Miguel Baptista Nunes, and Deng Zhonghua. Construction and Evolution of a Chinese Information Science and Information Service (CIS&IS) Onto-Thesaurus..............................................131

2. Book Reviews Handbook of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies. Edited by Miguel-Angel Sicilia. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. 2014. 570 p. ISBN 978-981-283-629-8 ............................................................. 332 3. Reports, Communications, Features, etc. Emilia Currás. The Nature of Information and Its Influence in Human Cultures ........................................................ 92 Ingetraut Dahlberg. What is Knowledge Organization?................................................................................... 85 Knowledge Organization First Annual “Best Paper in KO Award” for Volume 40 (2013 ......................................... 339 Obituary: Professor Arashanipalai Neelameghan..................... 341 Rebecca Green. ISKO and Knowledge Organization’s 25th Anniversary: The Future of Knowledge Organization and ISKO Panel Discussion................................ 327 Rick Szostak. How Universal is Universality? ........................... 468 Roman Šolc. The Czech System of Evaluation of Science Research Handicaps Interdisciplinary Science ............................................................................................ 410 What is Knowledge Organization? by Ingetraut Dahlberg, Knowl.Org. 31(2014) No.1, p. 87 ........... 188


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Smiraglia, Richard P. 2001. The nature of ‘a work’: implications for the or-ganization of knowledge. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow.

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2005. Instantiation: Toward a theory. In Vaughan, Liwen, ed. Data, information, and knowledge in a networked world; Annual confer-ence of the Canadian Association for Information Science … London, Ontario, June 2-4 2005. Available http://www.cais-acsi.ca/2005proceedings.htm.

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KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION Official Journal of the International Society for Knowledge Organization ISSN 0943 – 7444

International Journal devoted to Concept Theory, Classification, Indexing and Knowledge Representation

Scope

The more scientific data is generated in the impetuous present times,

the more ordering energy needs to be expended to control these data in

a retrievable fashion. With the abundance of knowledge now available

the questions of new solutions to the ordering problem and thus of im-

proved classification systems, methods and procedures have acquired

unforeseen significance. For many years now they have been the focus

of interest of information scientists the world over.

Until recently, the special literature relevant to classification was

published in piecemeal fashion, scattered over the numerous technical

journals serving the experts of the various fields such as:

philosophy and science of science

science policy and science organization

mathematics, statistics and computer science

library and information science

archivistics and museology

journalism and communication science

industrial products and commodity science

terminology, lexicography and linguistics

Beginning in 1974, KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION (formerly

INTERNATIONAL CLASSIFICATION) has been serving as a

common platform for the discussion of both theoretical background

questions and practical application problems in many areas of concern.

In each issue experts from many countries comment on questions of an

adequate structuring and construction of ordering systems and on the

problems of their use in opening the information contents of new litera-

ture, of data collections and survey, of tabular works and of other ob-

jects of scientific interest. Their contributions have been concerned with

(1) clarifying the theoretical foundations (general ordering theory/

science, theoretical bases of classification, data analysis and re-

duction)

(2) describing practical operations connected with indexing/classifi-

cation, as well as applications of classification systems and

thesauri, manual and machine indexing

(3) tracing the history of classification knowledge and methodology

(4) discussing questions of education and training in classification

(5) concerning themselves with the problems of terminology in gen-

eral and with respect to special fields.

Aims Thus, KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION is a forum for all those in-terested in the organization of knowledge on a universal or a domain-specific scale, using concept-analytical or concept-synthetical ap-proaches, as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologies. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION also addresses the intellectual and automatic compilation and use of classification systems and thesauri in all fields of knowledge, with special attention being given to the prob-lems of terminology.

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION publishes original articles, reports on conferences and similar communications, as well as book re-views, letters to the editor, and an extensive annotated bibliography of recent classification and indexing literature.

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION should therefore be available at every university and research library of every country, at every infor-mation center, at colleges and schools of library and information sci-ence, in the hands of everybody interested in the fields mentioned above and thus also at every office for updating information on any topic related to the problems of order in our information-flooded times.

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION was founded in 1973 by an international group of scholars with a consulting board of editors repre-senting the world’s regions, the special classification fields, and the sub-ject areas involved. From 1974-1980 it was published by K.G. Saur Ver-lag, München. Back issues of 1978-1992 are available from ERGON-Verlag, too.

As of 1989, KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION has become the official organ of the INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR KNOWL-EDGE ORGANIZATION (ISKO) and is included for every ISKO-member, personal or institutional in the membership fee.

Rates: From 2015 on for 8 issues/ann. (including indexes) € 329,00 (forwarding costs included) for the print version resp. € 359,00 for the print version plus access to the online version (PDF). Member-ship rates see above.

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Founded under the title International Classification in 1974 by Dr. Ingetraut Dahlberg, the founding president of ISKO. Dr. Dahlberg served as the journal’s editor from 1974 to 1997, and as its publisher (Indeks Verlag of Frankfurt) from 1981 to 1997.

The contents of the journal are indexed and abstracted in Social Sci-ences Citation Index, Web of Science, Information Science Abstracts, INSPEC, Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (EBSCO), Library Literature and Information Science (Wilson), PASCAL, Referativnyi Zhurnal Informatika, and Sociological Ab-stracts.

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KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION · Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.1 KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION Official Journal of the International Society for Knowledge Organization ISSN 0943 – 7444 International