User:KYPark/2006

This book is an extension of the discussions presented in Blair's 1990 book Language and Representation in Information Retrieval, which was selected as the "Best Information Science Book of the Year" by the

(ASIS). That work stated that the Philosophy of Language had the best theory for understanding meaning in language, and within the Philosophy of Language, the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was found to be most perceptive. The success of that book provided an incentive to look more deeply into Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, and how it can help us to understand how to represent the intellectual content of information. This is what the current title does, and by using this theory it creates a firm foundation for future Information Retrieval research. The work consists of four related parts. Firstly, a brief overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and its relevance to information systems. Secondly, a detailed explanation of Wittgenstein's late philosophy of language and mind. Thirdly, an extended discussion of the relevance of his philosophy to understanding some of the problems inherent in information systems, especially those systems which rely on retrieval based on some representation of the intellectual content of that information. And, fourthly, a series of detailed footnotes which cite the sources of the numerous quotations and provide some discussion of the related issues that the text inspires.

Michael Buckland is the keynote speaker of COOP'06; and an abstract of his talk is included in this book. Michael Buckland comes from the School of Information Management & Systems which is part of the University of California and located in Berkeley. He has contributed to renew the approach of documents particularly by going back to the foundational work of the French archivists like Suzanne Briet. His famous papers "What is a 'document'?" and "Information as Thing" are surprisingly relevant in the context of the CSCW debate about the importance of the materiality of coordinative artefacts.

He earned his Master of Library and Information Science degree in 2006 from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Previously, he was a systems administrator and project manager for the Rutgers University Libraries and the University of Washington Libraries.

In the field of library and information science, also known as information studies, critical theory is often not included in debates about the discipline's theoretical foundations. This paper argues that the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse, in particular, has a significant contribution to make to the field of information studies. Marcuse's focus, for instance, on `technical rationality' as a tool of domination in modern capitalist society is a useful construct for understanding how discourses of information technology are being used to perpetuate modernist notions of information and capitalist logics of consumption. It is argued here that critical theory theory and critical theory of technology have a particular relevance and salience to the study of information, and that any discipline that claims to study the creation, use, classification, and access of information simply cannot ignore the larger socio-political critiques of modern, technological society that Marcuse proposes.

My choice of chapter in the category of curiosity is 'Semantic relations in information science' by Knoo and Na, which is a very thorough review, even extending back to Jason Farradane's attempt to define a set of 'semantic operators' for information retrieval in the 1950s. Indeed, the 50s and 60s were a time of considerable interest in the semantic problem in information retrieval: in addition to Farradane, J-C Gardin in France was exploring the problem in a system called SYNTOL, and I vaguely recall work going on at Case Western Reserve University in Chicago. For anyone wishing to catch up with developments since then, this chapter is essential reading. I am personally dubious as to whether the Semantic Web will ever be a reality, outside some very narrowly defined fields of enterprise, but if it ever does come into being, semantic relationships among elements will be at its heart.