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LI SCI 110 Information science and information
theory

• Instructor Xiangming(Simon) Mu
• Sept. 9, 2004

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Information Science Information Technology ?
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Information

• Information
• To do with being informed, with reduction of
  ignorance and of uncertainty
• Sensory perception, comprehension, or
  psychological processes
• Broadly associated with messages
• Definition
• As signals or messages for decisions involving
  little or no cognitive processing. Information is
  treated as the property of a message
• As directly involving cognitive processing and
  understanding. Information is associated with a
  transaction between a record and user
• As a context. Information is a message that are
  cognitively processed in a contextsituation,
  task, problem-at-hand, etc.
• Motivation/intentionality
• Social horizonculture, work

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Information

• Perspectives
• Information as process concern the communication
  procedure
• Information as knowledge concern the impact,
  subject, and relations
• Information as thing concern the record, the
  document, and data (representation of knowledge)

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Information Science

• Definition
• effective communication of knowledge
  recordsliteratureamong humans in the context
  of social, organizational, and individual need
  for and use of information
• Information science is defined by
• the problems it has addressed
• the methods it has used for their solutions over
  time.
• Characteristics
• Interdisciplinary in nature
• Inexorably connected to information technology
• An active participant in the evolution of the
  information society (human/social dimension)
• Important ideas
• Information retrieval
• Relevance related to information needs and
  assessment
• Interaction between IR system and human beings
• Citation index mapping of literature

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Structure of Information Science

• Information Analysis (domain cluster)
• Literatures and their structure
• Text as objects
• Communication in various population
• Social context
• Information use, seeking and behavior
• Information Retrieval (retrieval cluster)
• IR theory and algorithms
• Practical IR processes and systems
• Human-computer interaction
• User studies
• (Digital) library systems
• Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC)

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Information Retrieval

• Systems-centered approach
• Concentrated on retrieval systems and processes
• Model based algorithms and evaluations
• Human-centered approach
• Concentrated on cognitive, interactive, and
  contextual end of the process
• Humans as the proper center of IR (feedback IR)
• The future of IR
• Integrate both systems and human factor

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Relevance

• What is relevance
• Effectiveness of exchange of information between
  people and IR systems
• Based on human judgments (subjectivity)
• Types of relevance
• System or algorithmic relevancebetween query and
  information objects as retrieved (Comparative
  effectiveness)
• Topical or subject relevancebetween subject
  expressed in query and subject covered by
  retrieved texts (aboutness)
• Cognitive relevance or pertinencebetween state
  of knowledge or cognitive information need and
  texts retrieved (quality)
• Situational relevance or utilitybetween
  situation, task or problem and texts retrieved
  (usefulness/appropriateness)
• Motivational or affective relevancebetween
  intents, goals, and motivations and texts
  retrieved (satisfaction)
• Applications
• Search Engines (Google and Yahoo)
  relevance/indexing ? A good idea to let Google
  to retrieve your lost files? Which level of
  relevance involved? How about image search?
• Online recommendations

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Disciplinary Relations

• Librarianship and Information Science
• Both concern the effective utilization
  (organization, preservation, and use) of records.
• Different in problems, theories, experimentation,
  tools, and strength
• Computer Science and Information Science
• Computer science is about algorithms that
  describe and transfer information
  (symbol-oriented)
• Information science is about the very nature of
  information and its use by humans (user-oriented)
• Meta-information, seeking, searching, retrieving,
  filtering use, quality, value, evaluation, and
  impact
• Example
• information visualization (Visual Thesaurus,
  Table Hunter)
• Interface design (Google/Yahoo)
• Overlap
• Expert systems, knowledge bases, hypertext,
  human-computer interaction

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Questions

• Information science information technology ?
• Information science information seeking ?
• Information science information record ?

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Our goal

• Find, study, and solve information related
  problems