Information Science – Fundamental Terminology (Knowledge, Document)
Articles from this series
- Information science - Introduction
- Information science – Uniqueness and essential questions
- Information science – Philosophical approaches
- Information science – Paradigms
- Information science – Epistemologies
- Information science – What is information?
Main source
Introduction to Information Science - DAVID BAWDEN and LYN ROBINSON
Terminology
Every science field has to settle down on some kind of terminology, or in other words language that describes relevant aspects of the science field in a way that will be understood by all of the participators. Information science does not have yet coherent terminology, or rather there are multiple definitions of most of the terms. From my perspective every information scientists has to settle with something and hope that it is the “right way”. Few following articles will present some of the terms and what are their current definitions. In the previous article I have described the most important term of them all the information.
Knowledge
There are two „legitimate“ ways in which knowledge can be understood. One is basically by using Poppers epistemology about 3 words (explained in the “Epistemology article”). His word 2 was formed by subjective knowledge if you still remember, while the third was formed by communicable objective knowledge. Information is then the way how to communicate the knowledge with other individuals. I personally am not fond of this explanation, because the explanation of what is information is in contradiction with how I think the objective world works. Just because any individual thinks that something is true from his rational perspective doesn’t make it true. If the “bundle of information” is not true, it can’t be called knowledge – maybe false knowledge at best. The second explanation fixes that.
The second model perceives information and knowledge as equal entities. Information is the raw “data” in the physical world, or any document. Knowledge is the information put meaningfully together. When the entropy is removed, the information together starts to make sense, because it already was processed and it became knowledge. It is highly likely that lot of humanity’s researches concluded false knowledge. Our perception is finaglable to say the least. Still such researches are connected to the sources that they worked with, whereas “knowledge” born in random individual heads cannot be linked to its sources that easily. Therefore knowledge from this point of view is much more relevant for scientific reasons.
Document
Most of you probably perceive document as text, audio, or video stored in a carrier, or file. You’re not that incorrect actually. Document really is information stored in a carrier, or file. It’s though much more complicated than just a text, video, or audio. What about an animal in a zoo, or a stone in a museum? They are documents too. So basically document is anything that was intentionally created to possess information that is supposed to be extracted, with a unique individual indexing code (so it, or its “tokens”, can be easily found in databases).
And what if I and my friend possess the same book? Is it the same document or are they 2 separate documents. Well they are one document in two different renderings. And what if the book was translated into different language? Is the translation still the same document? As soon as the new author does any additional “intellectual operation” in order to create the translated book (or anything else…variation of theater play, remix of any song, etc.) it is considered to be a new document.
