Toward a theory of indexing—II

541

292

The field of Information Science is constantly changing. Therefore, information scientists are required to regularly review-and if necessary-redefine its fundamental building blocks. This article is one of a group of four articles, which resulted from a Critical Delphi study conducted in 2003-2005. The study, "Knowledge Map of Information Science," was aimed at exploring the foundations of information science. The international panel was composed of 57 leading scholars from 16 countries, who represent (almost) all the major subfields and important aspects of the field. This particular article documents 130 definitions of data, information, and knowledge formulated by 45 scholars, and maps the major conceptual approaches for defining these three key concepts.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge

Zins¹

2007

541

292

“…This may be “the” most influential construct of information retrieval (cf. Landry & Rush, 1970, p. 358). The construct goes back to Bush's (1945) challenge to place the sum total of human knowledge at a person's fingertips.…”

Section: Integration Of Theoretical Constructsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The seventeen theoretical constructs of information searching and information retrieval

Jansen

Rieh

2010

In this article, we identify, compare, and contrast theoretical constructs for the fields of information searching and information retrieval to emphasize the uniqueness of and synergy between the fields. Theoretical constructs are the foundational elements that underpin a field's core theories, models, assumptions, methodologies, and evaluation metrics. We provide a framework to compare and contrast the theoretical constructs in the fields of information searching and information retrieval using intellectual perspective and theoretical orientation. The intellectual perspectives are information searching, information retrieval, and cross-cutting; and the theoretical orientations are information, people, and technology. Using this framework, we identify 17 significant constructs in these fields contrasting the differences and comparing the similarities. We discuss the impact of the interplay among these constructs for moving research forward within both fields. Although there is tension between the fields due to contradictory constructs, an examination shows a trend toward convergence. We discuss the implications for future research within the information searching and information retrieval fields.

“…This would be helpful to indexers and file system designers. Landry and Rush (1970) suggest this as one appropriate goal for future research in information retrieval, and we heartily agree. For reasons described elsewhere (Thompson, 1970) dealing with the use of coding theory in document indexing, we argue that there is an ideal probability distribution for index branches (truncated geometric) and we have been gathering information on these relative frequencies for approximately two years in an attempt to correlate the probability distribution parameters with a variety of users and search queries.…”

Section: Comments On Measures Of System Performancementioning

confidence: 76%

“…Since most indexes to document, collections possess a fixed structure and a controlled vocabulary, "the process of retrieval can be viewed as a homomorphic mapping of the request elements into elements of the index space" (Landry and Rush, 1970). However, if the index space has not been precisely defined to the user in structure and vocabulary, or unless the user brings this precise, complete description of structure and vocabulary to the search with him (which Meadow and Taylor indicate he normally does not) then the attempt to formulate a query describing his problem under the constraints of his system will tend to result in the frustrations Taylor talks about.…”

Section: Problems Of Query Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interface design for an interactive information retrieval system: A literature survey and a research system description

Thompson¹

1971

This article focuses on the human interaction characteristics of an information retrieval system, suggests some design considerations to improve man‐machine cooperation, and describes a research system at Stanford that is exploring some of these techniques. Librarians can only be of limited assistance in helping the naive user formulate an unstructured feeling in his mind into an appropriate search query that maps into the retrieval system. Consequently, the process of query formulation by the user, interactively with the information available in the system, remains one of the principal problems in information retrieval today. In an attempt to solve this problem by improving the interface communication between man and the computer, we have pursued the objective of displaying hierarchically structured index trees on a CRT in a decision tree format permitting the user merely to point (with a light pen) at alternatives which seem most appropriate to him. Using his passive rather than his active vocabulary expands his interaction vocabulary by at least an order of magnitude. Moreover, a hierarchically displayed index is a modified thesaurus, and may be augmented by adding lateral links to provide semantic assistance to the user. A hierarchical structure was chosen because it seems to replicate the structure of cognitive thought processes most closely, thus allowing the simplest, most direct transfer of the man's problem into the structure and vocabulary of the system.