Since its initial standardization in , Topic which the model was gradually refined, the work was Maps is finding increasing application as the foundation for brought into ISO, and went through further revision cycles Web sites and portals, as well as in knowledge management before being adopted as ISO under the editor- KM , e-learning, and more.
Michel Biezunski and This entry provides a comprehensive treatment of the Martin Bryan. This entry according to the SGML Architecture facility offered by the follows the established convention of using initial capitals draft HyTime standard. In order to create an XML-based version of the specification an ad hoc working group called TopicMaps.
In addition to defining a new, XML-compatible DTD The concepts of Topic Maps originated in the context of for representing topic maps, the new specification removed the Davenport Group, during the development of the Doc- the dependence on HyTime, clarified some of the termin- Book application, as an answer to the problem of how to ology, and simplified parts of the model.
All rights reserved. In , the XTM DTD was property of information is not where it resides the docu- folded back into the second edition of the ISO standard[2] ment-centric view or which application was used to and from that point on stewardship of the standard passed create it the application-centric view , but its aboutness, back to the ISO committee. This subject- centric view lies at the very heart of the Topic Maps Current Status paradigm.
There are many reasons for insisting on the primacy of In a road map was devised for the further develop- subjects: the starting point for most acts of information ment of the standard, to include a data model, reference retrieval e.
While other Maps— forms of metadata such as author, publisher, and creation — Part 1: Overview and basic concepts[3] date are important for certain information management — Part 2: Data model[4] tasks, for the key end-user task of information retrieval, — Part 3: XML syntax[5] aboutness is most critical.
Since the purpose of Topic — Part 4: Canonicalization[6] Maps is to alleviate infoglut and improve the findability Downloaded By: [Pepper, Steve] At: 30 September — Part 5: Reference model[7] of information, subject-centricity is the central feature.
Most of the remain- anything whatsoever, regardless of whether it exists or has der exist as stable drafts and are expected to be published any other specific characteristics, about which anything in These are also the kind of subjects one would expect to find in the index of a book on opera. The back-of-book index is used throughout as model for representing subjects such as these, and asser- a familiar point of reference for illustrative purposes. In tions about them, within an information system.
The line with long-established tradition in the Topic Maps Topic Maps Reference Model TMRM ,[7] which offers a community, this entry will use the domain of opera for more abstract and low-level model, is described below. In the words of the standard: The core concepts of Topic Maps are relatively few and for the most part easily grasped. They are often referred to 3.
The solution adopted in the TMDM is to use explicit, globally unique identifiers. If two topics The collocation objective share an identifier they are deemed to represent the same subject and merging occurs.
Because of this, the international characters. The goal of any Maps systems. Subject locators were called subject Topic Maps application is to ensure that each subject is addresses in the first version of the standard. They can therefore only erything that is known within a given system about be used with subjects that have a specific location that can a particular subject becomes accessible from a single point, Downloaded By: [Pepper, Steve] At: 30 September be expressed using a URI—in other words, network- via the one and only topic representing that subject, and thus addressable information resources, such as documents the problem of information retrieval is in principle solved.
Subjects like this achieved within a system relies heavily on the Topic Maps can be identified directly via their network addresses. This is achieved in the Topic Maps paradigm through indirect identification using subject identifiers. Subject identifiers are for use by computers in ascertaining whether or not two topics represent the same subject: if two topics have an identifier in common, they are simply merged; Fig.
The TAO of Topic Maps Having covered the essentials of subjects and how they back-of-book index and serve a similar navigational pur- are represented by topics, we now turn to assertions about pose.
But there is an important difference in that associa- subjects. Associations represent general relationships tion types adds precision, provides more information between subjects; occurrences represent a particular form to the user, and improves findability. The jects. Binary associations involving two subjects, as in following section describes each of these in more detail.
Associations of Topic Maps. However, because of their ubiquity and higher arity are infrequent; the relationships they might utility in knowledge modeling, two association types be used to represent such as that between an opera and are given special status.
That one of focus. This situation is reflected in Topic Maps by is, type hierarchies—not subject hierarchies of the kind used the absence of any formal notion of direction in associa- in subject classification systems, where the subjects do not tions. Exactly what constitutes the roles in this relation- topic type and an association role type.
The concept "information" is of signal importance to all the information disciplines. Perhaps for that reason, it is a term that has been defined in countless ways, over many decades.
It would be fair to say that there is no widely agreed-upon definition or theoretical conception of the term.
The meaning of this term is still highly contested. In this regard, the status of the term is similar to that of "communication" in the communication sciences. In light of the lack of agreement about the definition of the term "information," the main objective of this entry will be to lay out some of the major classes of definitions and theoretical constructions of the term that are currently or recently in play. No effort will be made to capture and discuss every definition that has been provided in the literature; rather major types will be presented, as well as popular ideas that are recurrent in the literature.
The discussion draws from writings over the last sixty years; the approach is by category rather than by chronology. The effort to define information is active in other disciplines besides those explicitly concerned with the topic; philosophy, cognitive science, electrical engineering, computer science, and systems theory, among others, have been active players on this scene as well.
The objective of this entry, however, is to concentrate on the ideas about information that have been either developed within the information disciplines or, in a few cases, which have come from other fields but have also been influential in the information disciplines. Some authors embed a discussion of information within a much larger philosophical or theoretical program.
In other words, exposition of the meaning of the term "information" is not a primary goal, but only incidental to much larger projects. It is beyond the focus of this article to attempt a review of these larger intellectual programs.
After the preamble, conceptions of information of the following types will be reviewed, in succession:. In the process, the work of the following people will be addressed: Marcia J. In this entry, no summary conclusion is made about "the best" or "the truest" understanding of the concept of information.
Rather, the purpose is to present the array of ideas flowing around this core concept in the information disciplines, so that the reader may become acquainted with the issues. In that era there was a tremendous amount of attention directed to the technical revolution s that had become possible with the development of computers, television, new communication technologies, and a new way of thinking about information.
Today, many scholars write dismissively about the concept of information see the last portion of this entry , and reject the earlier excitement around the "Information Age" and the "Information Society" as a love affair with a cold, technical, even militaristic conception of the technology-driven society.
Ironically, as we shall see, it was, in fact, the very fecund power of that deracinated definition of information — i. The several streams of new thinking on information were startling, different, and stimulating, compared to prior understanding.
I believe that the impact was so fundamental that an earlier generation can be forgiven for inventing ideas like the "Information Age," the "Information Society" and "information explosion. It is fashionable now to deride that earlier absorption with the new concepts, but we are able to deride these concepts only because we have so thoroughly absorbed the learning from that time, that it feels easy to dismiss it in favor of newer ideas.
The ever-present fact is that people both build on and react to what was present earlier in their lives. This author is old enough to remember that earlier time, and I choose to present that era as I understood it, as a bit of a counter to the somewhat dismissive attitude toward it that is popular nowadays.
Boulding 17 wrote about three levels of organization in life — 1 static structures, 2 clockwork, i. These three levels have some parallel in the development of science in the Western world — the medieval belief in a static world created by God, followed by the Newtonian discovery and analysis of dynamic processes, followed by the cybernetic understanding of the role of information in life processes.
The world of Newton and his epigones was one in which the theory of forces and impacts, of recognizable regular, measurable change was developed. The quintessential model of the mechanical universe is that of billiard balls being hit and rolling into other balls and making them move in a certain direction with a certain force. The movement of the planets was closely measured, the mathematics of change in the form of the calculus was developed, and a deep threat to the medieval concept of the static universe arose.
The long history of religious controversy, with Galileo as a prime example, and proceeding through the inquisition, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation, was in no small part due to the fundamental challenge offered by this new dynamic idea of how the universe worked. In the twentieth century, information began to become important in the thinking of science and society.
Problems of observation and the impact of observation emerged in early twentieth-century physics. The term came from a Greek root word meaning to govern or steer. Wiener illustrated just how significant the idea was in his description of research that he conducted with a physician on physiological processes [18, Introduction, Chapter 4]. Again, grossly simplifying, the thinking in that day in physiology was that when I reach out to pick up a pencil, this process is achieved by my brain sending a signal to muscles and tendons along the lines of "go get it," and the machinery of my arm goes into action and picks up the pencil.
This was a classically mechanical concept of my actions. A pulse goes out to my arm to do a certain thing, I act, then the pulse diminishes. Wiener and his colleague demonstrated that the process did not work that way. Instead, when I start to pick up the pencil, I extend my arm in the direction of the pencil, and then, utilizing constant kinesthetic and visual feedback , I micro-adjust the position of my arm repeatedly and successively until it successfully lands on the pencil, grasps it, and picks it up.
Picking up the pencil is not a single, mechanical, act, but rather an extended behavior utilizing continuous information feedback telling me whether my hand is on or off course, and if off course, enabling me to adjust the tension in muscles and the direction of my reach so that I can successfully touch and pick up the pencil [18, p.
Thus, in cybernetic situations, two processes are going on continuously in parallel — the physical forces, and the detection and utilization of information about the physical forces, which information is used to affect the physical actions. While the billiard ball model was the one commonly used for the mechanical understanding of the universe, with the impact of cybernetic thinking, the household thermostat became the standard model of cybernetics and feedback.
In the summer heat, I set the thermostat for a certain temperature. When the heat in the room affects a sensing mechanism in the thermostat beyond a certain point, the air conditioning starts, and cools the room down to where the sensing mechanism again achieves its desired temperature, and the air conditioning shuts off. The sensing mechanism provides continuous information, and the design of the thermostat is such that when the information indicates that the room temperature is outside a desired range, the air conditioning comes on.
Governing, or steering, is about utilizing information feedback, to direct the ship of action. In the larger history of scientific thinking, the development of cybernetics drew attention to the distinct role of information in physical and social processes. Previously, the kinesthetic and visual feedback I get while picking up the pencil — as well as in countless other information-based processes — had been almost entirely invisible in the thinking of science.
Shannon and Wiener worked on some of the same ideas during this fertile period. Shannon, working at the Bell Laboratories, however, developed the mathematical and engineering theory to put an understanding of information on a firm basis.
Shannon found a way to measure the amount of information going over a transmission channel. As Wiener puts it, "…we had to develop a statistical theory of the amount of information , in which the unit amount of information was that transmitted as a single decision between equally probably alternatives" [18, p. Since the alternative messages, letters, words, or other units of communication are not always sent with equal probability, the formula Shannon developed measured the amount of information as a function of two things — the number of alternatives out of which a message might be selected for sending, and the probabilities of the various messages.
The more possible messages from which the sent message is selected, and the more equiprobable the messages, the greater the amount of information transmitted.
Before him, engineers really did not have a means of computing the maximum amount of information that could be transmitted through a channel of a given size or configuration. It was assumed that it would be possible to go on improving channels to carry more and more information. Once Shannon developed a firm model of the amount of information, actual and possible, in a channel, he could clarify the role of redundancy, of error rates, and noise in a channel.
For example, since the letters of the alphabet do not appear in written text with equal probabilities, the amount of information conveyed with English text is well less than percent of the amount of information that could be conveyed if each letter were equiprobable.
Further, Shannon mathematically analyzed the role of noise in a channel, and the ways in which redundancy could compensate for the noise. These discoveries were immensely important for all sorts of communication engineering situations. Go to the right section of an engineering library, and one can find textbooks full of hundreds of mathematical formulas developed out of these crucial insights by Shannon. His impact went well beyond engineering, however. It was as if for the first time people saw the informational regularities beneath the surface variety of the text sent over a wire or the words spoken on the telephone or written in a book.
What is currently forgotten, however, is that this separation was in fact an achievement. People had not been able to make that differentiation before. Now, with far greater clarity and understanding, the handling of information in quantitative terms at last came it its own. The fundamental clarification of the relationship between messages and the amount of information they convey Shannon , and the concomitant recognition of the important role of information throughout life processes Wiener led to an enormous surge of research and theorizing throughout science about information.
Other researchers, such as John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, had important roles as well. Just as those hundreds of mathematical formulas had to be worked out in the engineering world, so also did the social sciences need to work with these same ideas and transform some parts of those disciplines. There were many insights gained, but many problems encountered as well. After a while, the initial enthusiasm in the social sciences waned — to the point where it is now fashionable to deride these post-War ideas.
But we are shaped by those ideas so thoroughly nonetheless, that we can only attempt to throw off their influence. Some authors even take the approach to the point of identifying meaning with information. In , 23 he simplified it to "a stimulus which expands or amends the World View of the informed" [23, p. Gregory Bateson 24 applied concepts of information and feedback to the psychodynamics of human relations, most famously writing of the pathological, feedback-based, "Double Bind" relationship [24, p.
He also wrote about information science. Expressing the semiotic approach still more generally, Bateson said that information is a difference that makes a difference [24, p. This approach has its roots in the idea of the single difference being the elementary unit of amount of information, the single bit, the zero or one. The difference that makes a difference, presumably, makes that difference to a sensing being. Brookes, 25 one of the grand old men of British information science, took a similar tack.
The following is his "fundamental equation" for the relationship between information and knowledge. Thus the human knowledge structure in the mind is changed in some way with the input of information.
Nauta 26 takes information quite explicitly to be meaning, but in a particular sense. Thus, information is the meaning that is common to all the different ways of expressing that meaning. Here, it would seem that only representations can contain redundancies, because information is the common meaning core to all the different possible representations.
In this approach Nauta drew on both semiotic and Shannon information theoretic approaches. Losee 27 developed what he calls a "discipline-independent definition" of information. Information is always informative about something, being a component of the output or result of the process. Losee takes as his central example the baking of a cake. Get BOOK. Spanning all types of libraries, from public to academic, school, and special, this book illuminates the major facets of library and information science for aspiring professionals as well as those already practicing in the field.
Foundations of Library and Information Science. Spanning all types of libraries, from public to academic, school, and special, this book illuminates the major facets of library and information science for asp. Those with a technological background in information retrieval, databases or CSCW are understandably more inclined to focus on the ways that technologies support or fail to support collaboration.
By contrast, those with a background in studies of information use, information needs and information seeking behavior inevitably focus on what people do, what they want to or try to do and the ways in which these activities have a social dimension. From this we can try and explain why it is worthwhile to consider collaboration as an extra factor. Firstly, the collaboration may be a component of the larger context in which the information seeking occurs. That is, it may be necessary to consider collaborative issues that occur because of what is done before and after the perhaps individual information retrieval activity.
For some researchers this larger context is inherently social and is a critical part of understanding the information need, and what results. There may be an interaction that is a critical subpart of the overall process that needs to be understood and perhaps improved by managerial, educational or technological interventions. For example, the reference interview is a well known and well studied collaborative interaction within an information seeking process, even if it is assumed that all prior and subsequent aspects of that process are solitary.
People may collaborate in reaction to the complexity of the underlying task, the difficulty of obtaining any information at all, or the difficulty of dealing with too much information.
Both information dearth and information glut may be addressed by collaborative endeavors with several people working on a problem to try and make some headway on it. Finally, new technologies may make collaboration easier or cheaper, or new kinds possible. Why this matters is that application development needs to take account of assumed, overlooked or implicit uses, features and activities. If these are not explicitly designed-in they can be much more difficult to employ in actual use.
For example, paper does not have to be specially designed to be annotatable — online documents do. Additionally, a sensitivity to social aspects of information search and use allows researchers to imagine new kinds of collaboration that technology might enable.
For example, the classic study by Allen 18 comparing the information -seeking behavior of engineers and scientists noted the existence of people who took on the role of gatekeepers, looking for and forwarding information to the group. Other early visionary work that considered how systems could be improved by adding in support for collaboration and reuse of the search activities of others include that of Bush 19 and Swanson Each stage can use a variety of different technologies and resources.
Recognize and accept an information need This can be a group-based activity, as when a work team discovers that they need some information to make progress on a larger task, or when the task itself is one of obtaining and analyzing information.
Understand and define problem As a group activity, the need will have to be articulated, requiring greater clarity than in IIR. This can also involve task delegation, splitting up and assigning work roles and establishing the way that the work will flow from person to person over time. It also can involve seeking or receiving advice on which resources to use, how to prioritize, and assessments of the quality, coverage, and authority of particular resources.
The resources themselves can be other people. Formulate query Ideas about keywords and phrases to try and how to combine them can be generated collectively.
This is likely to lead to a number of different queries to try on different iterations of the sequence. Execute query Even in collaborative interactions it is most likely that a single query will be executed by an individual. However, the eight step process is iterative and with collaboration it can also run in parallel. If several people are involved, it can be valuable to share the process information of which queries have been tried to date, which remain to be done and who is doing what.
Queries can also be reused over time, either to see if new information has arrived that meets the older query, or as inspiration for more sophisticated subsequent searches. Examine results This involves discussion about the relevance of the results obtained and prioritization decisions about which to examine in more detail. If collaborating at the same time in the same place, this can be done around a shared screen. If results are shared, it can be important to also share the process by which the results were obtained.
This process information as described in the other stages is needed in order to make informed decisions both about what was obtained and whether additional search is justified to try and find what else might exist that could be relevant. Extract information Typically done from the full text, this requires document sharing along with annotation and collaborative editing features, although something as simple as a word processor and email can fulfill this need.
It also requires a coordination and synthesis of the separate search activities performed by team members. Reflect, iterate, stop Reflection and iteration require knowledge of what has been done.
In IIR this resides in the memory of the individual searcher and any available external artifacts and representations. In CIR, the thoughts and experiences of others need to be shared, requiring mechanisms for communication text, audio, video, or face-to-face meetings as well as the sharing of artifacts the products of search and any process information.
Iteration is a consequence of earlier steps having an impact on the understanding of both what has been found so far and indeed on the information need that can evolve in the light of what is discovered.
With more than one person involved, it is necessary to ensure that these changing individual understandings are shared and re-coordinated. Within CSCW research, considerable attention has been given to the issue of awareness; how in traditional co-located workplace settings people manage it in subtle but low cost ways, and how CSCW technologies need to provide explicit support for awareness, particularly for remote collaboration. This activity of grounding typically requires discussion not just of the products of search, but of the processes.
Two kinds of process information that have been found to be particularly useful are explicit representations of search histories 11 , and the history of an information object - what has been done with a document, annotations, log history and document link history 6. With an awareness of what others in a team are doing, it is possible not just to provide information or advice when asked, but also to volunteer information — a kind of collaborative information push rather than CIR.
Different people will have different skills in using particular technologies and domain expertise in judging and interpreting particular items and result sets which is why a collective approach can be useful. These kinds of skill include not just how-to skills, but also valuable tacit knowledge and opinions about the interpretation of results and the quality of information sources As a consequence, participants will be explicitly or implicitly teaching each other some of their skills A medical research team undertaking a meta-review of the literature is clearly explicitly collaborating: they know each other and they are addressing a complex problem by a team-based approach of more people working on the task, bringing different kinds of expertise and allowing multiple reviews for avoiding error and oversight 9.
Equally a reference interview is a kind of explicit collaboration, as is a suggestion from a colleague of a resource that might be of interest. But a person can be helped to find what they want by more indirect involvement of other people: a web page linking to another site, a research paper citing a book, a bestseller list giving recommendations based on the purchasing decisions of others.
In all these cases, the person helped may have no direct contact with the people whose activity has helped them, may not even know them and indeed may never know them. Although implicit collaboration is possible without computational support, technologies make it much faster and easier and can enable whole new kinds of support. One way to make sense of this variety is to think about familiar examples from the non-digital world.
Consider a solitary information searcher in a library. Parts of that information environment e. Other parts of the environment have been structured e. On top of this basic structure further additions e.
Additionally, the differential use of certain information in the past by that searcher and others will affect current use e. Switching to online resources we find an ever-growing number of variants of these kinds of annotation, connections, recommendations and use-based data that can help us benefit from the actions of individuals and whole groups of strangers.
The environment faced by our initial searcher is dependent on the actions of many other people - though not all the aspects are easily identified with specific individuals. Some elements e. The act of navigating in such a structured information space is necessarily a piece of social navigation rather than a purely personal one. Arguably, even interacting with an unstructured collection of books is a piece of social navigation the content would not exist without the authors ; but one that we have become familiar with.
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