Information is costly to manipulate and retrieve. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. We have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world. They help build in our mind an idea. And that’s what true narratives do. They don’t just paint pictures they build structures in our mind upon which logic is built.

Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction (Floridi [2008]) adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory. The reader may wish to keep this in mind while reading this entry, where some schematic simplifications and interpretative decisions will be inevitable.

There is a first layer where we deal with libraries, their contents and services. Compare this with the accountant’s calculations and financial procedures. One may wish to develop a theory of everyday mathematics and its social practices—surely this would be a worthy and interesting study—but it seems impossible to confuse it with the study of mathematics as a formal science. The latter is a second layer. It is what LIS amounts to, what one learns, with different degrees of complexity, through the university curriculum that educates a librarian or an information specialist. There is then a third layer, in which only a minority of people is interested. We call it foundational. For mathematics, it is the philosophy of mathematics. I suggested PI for LIS. My point here is that it is important to acknowledge and respect the distinction between these three layers; otherwise one may criticize x for not delivering y when x is not there to deliver y in the first place. When checking whether the bank charged you too much for an overdraft, you are not expected to provide an analysis of the arithmetic involved in terms of Peano’s axioms. Likewise, a scientist may be happy with a clear understanding of statistics without ever wishing to enter into the philosophical debate on the foundations of probability theory. So I do not see why LIS cannot be provided with an equally theoretical approach, capable of addressing issues that the ordinary practitioner and the expert would deem too abstract to deserve attention in everyday practices.

Michael Buckland's notes on Wilhelm Ostwald.

"Ostwald discussed problems of information management with Paul Otlet, co-founder of the International Institute for Bibliography in Brussels, in 1910. He used most of his Nobel Prize money to finance a similar organization, Die Bruecke ('The Bridge'), an 'international institute for the organizing of intellectual work,' which he founded in Munich with Karl Wilhelm Buehrer and Adolf Saager in June 1911.   The manifesto of the The Bridge, entitled, the 'The Organizing of Intellectual Work' was published in German and in Esperanto ('everybody's second language') in 1911."

"They advocated 'the monographic principle' (hypertext), technical standards, the use of the Universal Decimal Classification, and the idea of a World Brain. The Bridge ended in 1913 after publishing numerous pamphlets. Ostwald died in 1932. One lasting legacy of his work is the international standard for paper sizes (A4 etc.)."

NYT article on Paul Otlet, with an excellent graphic explaining the Mundaneum system, and a video excerpt from the documentary on him.

We explore unsupervised approaches to relation extraction between two named entities; for instance, the semantic bornIn relation between a person and location entity. Concretely, we propose a series of generative probabilistic models, broadly similar to topic models, each which generates a corpus of observed triples of entity mention pairs and the surface syntactic dependency path between them. The output of each model is a clustering of observed relation tuples and their associated textual expressions to underlying semantic relation types. Our proposed models exploit entity type constraints within a relation as well as features on the dependency path between entity mentions. We examine effectiveness of our approach via multiple evaluations and demonstrate 12% error reduction in precision over a state-of-the-art weakly supervised baseline.

In this paper we present a novel, customizable IE paradigm that takes advantage of predicate-argument structures. We also introduce a new way of automatically identifying predicate argument structures, which is central to our IE paradigm. It is based on: (1) an extended set of features; and (2) inductive decision tree learning. The experimental results prove our claim that accurate predicate-argument structures enable high quality IE results.

245 Organization of Information in Collections. (3) Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 202 or consent of instructor. Standards and practices for description and organization of bibliographic, textual, and nontextual collections. Design, selection, maintenance and evaluation of cataloging, classification, indexing and thesaurus systems for particular settings. Vocabulary control. Codes, formats and standards for data representation and transfer.

We have traditionally analyzed collections of information or things using categories like libraries, museums, archives, content or knowledge management systems, and data repositories. The concept of an organizing system complements this categorical view with a dimensional perspective that sees these categories as sets of design patterns that reflect typical answers to questions about what is being organized, why, when, how much, who is doing the organizing, and how services are provided to interact with the organizing system. These dimensions frame trade-offs and constraints about the content, policies, and implementation of organizing systems. The primary goal of this course is to use these design dimensions to better understand traditional design patterns and their consequences, and to identify useful new ones.

For example, the thingness, uniqueness, persistence, useful lifetime, mashability, and intended uses and users of the content of an organizing system jointly determine how it is implemented and operated. We will examine how these design influences intersect, and consider what alternative designs would look like if some of these content and policy choices were to change. Furthermore, in many domains the Web has become the default implementation of organizing systems interfaces, yet we don't critically examine the implications this should have on the system itself. So we will study how Web Architecture — or the architectures and constraints implied by other metamodels and architectures such as Linked Data or WS-* services — influence decisions about content granularity and structure, how identity and provenance are supported, the kinds of interactions and services the organizing system allows, and so on.

"There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency. And the way most journalists 'expose' secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

"According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will 'carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,' a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary."

"… it is a fallacy to think that if the quantity of information increases, the quality of information increases as well. This is pretty obviously false, and, in fact, the reverse might be true."

Patrick Wilson's classic treatise.

1999 interviews with Patrick Wilson.

This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit, or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project.

The Epistemological Lifeboat is an attempt to guide students and researchers into the complex field of epistemology/philosophy of science.

REST maximizes the growth of identified information within a multi-organizational, network-based information system, which increases the utility of the system as a whole.

The international conference USE-2008 aims at addressing issues related to theoretical conceptions and empirical applications of research on information use in knowledge production processes at different levels of activity in society.

Although such monitoring could raise privacy issues, Google stresses that the Google ethics are optional.

People are even more powerful than information.

Information won't be free because its creation has costs. At the root, these costs derive from the fact that the production of information takes time and effort, and time and effort are scarce.

The Semantic Web (and the web in general) is a co-ordination problem among a large number of publishers and consumers of information that do minimal communication with each other.

Designers and marketers as brains of enterprise creativity, living on information circulation. Information systems consisting of humans, computers, and their social environment, stimulating dynamic streams of information and data.

Design research involves the analysis of the use and performance of designed artifacts to understand, explain and very frequently to improve on the behavior of aspects of Information Systems.

I like to think of the blogosphere as a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins).

As my host Michael Buckland observed, there is clarity in the counsel of our fundamentals: making information available, ensuring open access, assisting others in discovery, creating user-empowering tools and services.

His research interests lie primarily in the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Knowledge Management, Computer Supported Cooperative Learning, Entertainment Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Participatory Design, and Organizational Computing

The data is stored in JSON files, and the database is implemented in Javascript and running inside the web browser.

Design and evaluation of digital record-keeping, archival, museum and other evidence-based information systems; metadata for recordkeeping, preservation, and cultural information.

The measurement and analysis of the role information plays in the economy and of the resources devoted to production, distribution, and consumption of information.

Standards and practices for organization and description of bibliographic, textual, and non-textual collections.

The DailyKos folks have run into the limitations of free tagging, and want to move toward a controlled vocabulary maintained by professional librarians.

This course examines issues of information quality in mediated communication, asking how in the past people reached conclusions about the reliability, value, or authenticity of content and how they do so today.

You can now build your own Flamenco navigation system!

Composing, nurturing, collecting, maintaining, and making associations within information; the environments and related tools in which these activities take place; and the theory behind these activities and environments.

A concept is suggested that allows building context and structure around the content and existing information organization, using trails, or paths, through the Wiki content.

Senior principal scientist in MITRE’s Center for Information Technology, looking at how to use narrative to present information effectively.

This course explores issues of information quality in mediated communication and how people reach conclusions about the reliability, value, or authenticity of content.

Research focuses on the ways in which communication and information technologies structure and extend human interaction, with particular emphases on processes of organizing and information evaluation and sharing.

Her research and writing focus on the social and cultural changes associated with information and communication technologies and the relationship between new technologies and knowledge.

The Superimposed Pluggable Architecture for Contexts and Excerpts (SPARCE) is a middleware architecture for superimposed information management.

Research interests are information technology and organizational behavior, social networks, and organizational theory.

How is information produced, consumed and embedded within different cultural, organizational and community contexts?

Information society; social and cultural aspects of communication/information technologies; scholarly communication; communication and knowledge.

You can insert your own "news article" into Google News, for thousands or millions to discover and read.

Current research examines workforce development and upward mobility in information technology in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Search engines are like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

Tanaka Katsumi's lab at Kyoto University's Department of Social Informatics, focused on Digital Library research (including video).

The core of our service portfolio is a technological platform that consistently makes available innovations in the areas of Social Software, Semantic Web and Information Retrieval.

Too much information makes you dumber, splits the attention. The web is essentially satanic.

The author's experiences as a master's and doctoral student at the UC Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies during a formative period in the history of information science, 1966-71, are described.

The first i-Conference will bring together administrators, faculty members, and graduate students to celebrate our field and bridge disciplines to confront grand challenges of information-related research and education.