L&I SCI 110: Information science and information theory

Instructor: Xiangming(Simon) Mu

Sept. 9, 2004

Information Science = Information Technology ?

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 context—situation, task, problem-at-hand, etc.

• Motivation/intentionality• Social horizon—culture, work

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)

)2()1()()( KKIRMSMS

Information Science• Definition:

– effective communication of knowledge records—”literature”—among 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

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)

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

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 relevance—between query and information objects as retrieved

(Comparative effectiveness)

– Topical or subject relevance—between subject expressed in query and subject covered by retrieved texts (aboutness)

– Cognitive relevance or pertinence—between state of knowledge or cognitive information need and texts retrieved (quality)

– Situational relevance or utility—between situation, task or problem and texts retrieved (usefulness/appropriateness)

– Motivational or affective relevance—between 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

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

Questions

Information science = information technology ?

Information science = information seeking ?

Information science = information record ?

Our goal

Find, study, and solve information related problems