Assignment #9

Identify an information environment of your choice and write an essay to address the following questions: (3000 words)• What should be your role within this environment?

• How can the principles of information organization and representation help you in performing this role?

• What are the challenges facing you in performing the role? How will you address these challenges?

Technology today is quickly evolving. The things that we don’t know will be known easily through the Internet and it is because of technology. In this assignment, my task is to identify an information environment of my choice and state my role as a student in this environment. In addition, I should be able to explain how the principles of information organization and representation help me in performing my role. Lastly, I will be able to know the challenges that I’m facing in performing the role and how I will address to these challenges, but before anything else, what is an Information Environment?

Information Environment is the aggregate of individuals, organizations, or systems that collect, process, or disseminate information; also included is the information itself. It helps people to access to electronic resources, new environments for learning, teaching and research, guidance on institutional change, and provide advisory and consultancy services.

There is now a critical mass of digital information resources that can be used to support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators in their work and study. The production of information is on the increase and ways to deal with this effectively are required. There is the need to ensure that quality information isn’t lost amongst the masses of digital data created everyday. If we can continue to improve the management, interrogation and serving of ‘quality’ information there is huge potential to enhance knowledge creation across learning and research communities. The aim of the Information Environment is to help provide convenient access to resources for research and learning through the use of resource discovery and resource management tools and the development of better services and practice. The Information Environment aims to allow discovery, access and use of resources for research and learning irrespective of their location.

The Information Environment that I have chosen is The Meta Information Environment of Digital Libraries. The meta-information environment of a library is the aspect of library structure that is likely to be most affected by Digital Library technology. It is important to design meta-information environments for Digital Libraries that simultaneously compensate for the loss of many of the services of librarians and take advantage of the ability to apply digital processing to information objects in the collection of Digital Libraries.

Meta-Information Environment of Digital Libraries

Libraries are organized to facilitate access to controlled collections of information. Traditional libraries (TL's) possess three organizational characteristics that, together, provide a basis for such access. These are the organization of information into physical information objects (IO's) such as books; the physical organization of the collections of IO's according to various attributes, such as subject matter and author; an organized information environment that facilitates direct access to the IO's based on such attributes as author, title, and subject matter, as well as a limited degree of indirect access to the information contained in the IO's.

This last characteristic of a TL typically involves multiple sources of information to support access, such as librarians, catalogs, and the manner in which the collections are organized physically. Since it involves information about information, we term this characteristic the meta-information environment of a library.

As currently conceived, digital libraries (DL's) are libraries in which the controlled collections are in digital form and access to the information in the collections is based almost entirely on digital technology. From a user's point of view, digital technology changes the three organizational characteristics of TL's. First, the organization of information into physical IO's is replaceable with a more flexible organization into logical IO's. Second, the single physical organization of a collection of IO's is replaceable with multiple logical organizations of IO's.

The third and most significant changes, however, occur in the meta-information environment of a library. In terms of advantages, having the IO's in digital form permits the use of digital technology in extracting information from the IO's. The extracted information may satisfy a user's ultimate need for information or it may be employed by “digital librarians'' in characterizing the IO's in the collection. In the latter case, this meta-information may be employed in providing access to the information encoded in the IO's. In terms of disadvantages, important interactions between librarians and users that occur in the meta-information environments of TL's may be lost with the near-automation of information access in DL's.

The term ``metadata'' has been applied in a large variety of contexts. For example, the topics of papers at a recent conference on metadata ranged from metadata in data dictionaries and its use in controlling the operations of database management systems; to metadata used for describing scientific datasets and supporting data sharing among scientists; to metadata used in DL's to support user access to information.

The concept of metadata, when applied in the context of current libraries, digital or traditional, typically refers to information that provides a (usually brief) characterization of the individual IO's in the collections of a library; is stored principally as the contents of library catalogs in TL's; is used principally in aiding users to access IO's of interest.

As an example of its use in the context of TL's, the term ``metadata'' is sometimes used to describe the descriptive cataloging that is specified by the Anglo-American cataloging rules and the MARC interchange format. Such information constitutes a major component of the cataloging information in most TL's. As an example of its use in the context of DL's, the term ``metadata'' has been used to describe the information of the ``Dublin Core'' and the associated ``Warwick Framework'' which is intended to support access to information on the World Wide Web. The Core specifies the concrete syntax for a small set of meta-information elements, and the Framework specifies a container architecture for aggregating additional metadata objects for interchange.

More generally, however, if one surveys the many contexts in which it has been applied, it becomes apparent that the concept associated with the term ``metadata'' is the principal focus of an emerging area of the information sciences whose goal is to discover appropriate methods for the modeling of various classes of IO's. Since a model of an IO is itself typically an IO, and since the concept that is generally associated with the term ``data'' is subsumed by the concept associated with the term ``information object'', it seems preferable to use the term ``meta-information'' and to define it as a model of an information object.

A Scenario for the Use of the Meta-information Environment in a Traditional Library

For the sake of concreteness, let us assume a user whose interest is in finding information on condor re-introduction programs in California. In order to access such information in a TL, the user may engage in a variety of activities. The four most important activities include consulting a librarian; consulting available catalog and reference materials; browsing through the open collections of the library; and processing the information that has been accessed.

Let us assume that the user begins a search by consulting a librarian, and indicates an initial interest in discovering whether programs for re-introducing condors from captive breeding populations have been a success. Several important processes may co-occur during these interactions. First, the librarian may build a ``cognitive model'' of the user that is employed in helping the user. As an example, the librarian may note the user's level of knowledge about the use of a library, and discover that the user does not understand the value of subject heading catalogs in searching for references to information on the decline of the condors.

Second, the librarian may build a cognitive model of the user's information requirements, or ``query'', typically in an iterative process during which the user may change the initial query. The librarian may discover, for example, that the user would like to know the locations of the release sites in order to visit them. Third, and depending on the context of the query, the librarian may also construct a model of the user's information processing requirements. In terms of our example, these might include estimating the time to hike to the release sites.

In conjunction with these emerging models of the user's knowledge base and information needs, the librarian employs a cognitive model of the library's information resources to determine an appropriate set of actions that will lead to the satisfaction of the user's information needs. Three classes of activities are worthy of note. First, the librarian may direct the user to meta-information, such as the subject catalog, that points directly to IO's of interest. Second, the librarian may guide the user to ``general'' meta-information that can be used in a less direct manner in finding IO's of interest. For example, the user may be directed to a gazetteer in order to find the geographical coordinates of the release sites, whose names the librarian may happen to know. These coordinates may then be used in accessing the appropriate maps from the library's map collection. Third, the librarian may suggest that the user browse in the ornithology section of the library to look for books that may be relevant to the topic of condors. In so doing, the user may assess meta-information in the form of titles and tables of contents.

Before leaving the library, the user may employ the relevant maps to estimate the time it would take to hike to the condor release areas.

A Characterization of the Meta-information Environment of a Traditional Library

The preceding example, which is by no means artificial, emphasizes the fact that the meta-information accessed by users of TL's in satisfying their information needs is not restricted to the meta-information in the author, title, and subject catalogs. In particular, the scenario was devised to emphasize that, during search, a user may conceivably employ as meta-information almost all the information sources in a library. Such sources range from the librarian's general knowledge of the world to information encoded in the IO's on the stacks.

An analysis of the preceding and similar usage scenarios suggests that one may further characterize the meta-information environment of a library in terms of a simple model involving sets of services for
coordinating user interactions with the meta-information environment, exemplified in the above scenario in terms of the user's interactions with the librarian; constructing models of the user, the user's query, and the user's workspace requirements, exemplified in our scenario by interactions with the librarian; providing access to models of IO's, exemplified in our scenario by use of the subject catalog and browsing among the stacks; making matches between the model of user queries and models of IO's, exemplified in our scenario in part by actions of the librarian and in part by actions of the user in relation to such library resources as the subject catalog; extracting information from retrieved IO's, exemplified in our scenario by the computation from the maps of the time it would take the user to hike to the release sites. creating models of IO's which, although an important service of the meta-information environment of libraries, is not exemplified in the preceding scenario.
The scenario emphasizes the key role played by librarians in providing services in the meta-information environment of many TL's.

Knowledge Representation Systems in the Meta- information Environments of Libraries

In order to analyze further the manner in which the preceding sets of services provide support for user access to information, it is useful to introduce the concept of knowledge representation systems (KRS's). We argue that an important component of the functionality of the six sets of meta-information services in TL's is provided by a diverse set of KRS's. This conceptualization in terms of KRS's provides a useful theoretical framework for the design and analysis of DL's.
A KRS may be defined as a system for representing and reasoning about the knowledge in some domain of discourse, and is generally comprised of: an underlying knowledge representation language (KRL), whose expressions are intended to represent knowledge about some domain of discourse;
a semantics that gives meaning to the expressions of the KRL in terms of the domain of discourse;
a set of reasoning rules that may be employed in inferring further useful expressions from a given set of expressions; a body of knowledge about the domain of discourse expressed in terms of the KRL.
Concepts similar to the concept of a KRS that have been used by other researchers in relation to meta-information include formal systems with interpretations and semi-formal systems.

In general, we may view the KRS's of a library as providing a diverse set of services that are of particular value in the modeling of both IO's and user queries. They are, for example, of particular significance in supporting the modeling of IO's in terms of their content, since, in principle, the content of library materials may refer to any representable aspect of our knowledge.
In order to gain further insight into the nature and significance of KRS's, we provide examples of their use in supporting key sets of services in the meta-information environments of TL's.

KRS supporting the User Query and IO Modeling Services
Thesauri are an important class of KRS's that are employed in constructing models of the subject matter (or ``content'') of IO's for the catalog systems of TL's. The motivation for the use of thesauri is the difficulties that arise from using a KRS based on natural language (NL) in this context. These difficulties arise from the syntactic and semantic complexity and the high levels of ambiguity that are typically associated with general expressions in NL. The KRL of a thesaurus, on the other hand, is designed to possess a restricted syntax and semantics that permits the representation of restricted domains of discourse in an unambiguous manner. These restrictions result in the construction of many domain-specific thesauri, which in essence represents a ``divide-and-conquer'' approach to building unambiguous representations of a complex world.

For the present purpose, we may use a highly-simplified view of a thesaurus that is abstracted from the ANSI-NISO standard for thesauri.

The KRL of a thesaurus may be viewed as specifying the terms of a simple language and a few relations (or predicates) defined on the terms. These predicates include the three ``broad term/narrow-term'' predicates, the ``related term'' predicate, and the ``synonymous term'' predicate.

In relation to the semantics associated with its KRL, a term defined in a thesaurus is intended to denote a single concept. Typically, terms represent classes of entities, although class instances are permitted. Ambiguity arising from synonymous and homonymous terms is effectively removed. The mapping from terms to concepts is provided informally by the cognitive processing of the reader of the terms.

With respect to reasoning procedures, the use of the basic inference rules of logic (such as ``if A and A implies B are both true, then B is true"), together with axioms involving the various predicates (such as ``if A is a narrow term for B, and B is a narrow term for C, then A is a narrow term for C''), it is possible to carry out simple reasoning that is interpretable in terms of the concepts being represented in the KRL.

In terms of viewing a thesaurus as representing a body of knowledge about some aspect of the world, the terms and predicates of a thesaurus represent a set of concepts and their relations that model some aspect of the world.

Large numbers of thesauri are currently employed in library contexts. The representation of the content of IO's is typically achieved by choosing a relatively small number of terms from some domain-specific thesaurus.

Another important research issue concerns the construction of semantic mappings between the KRL's of different KRS's. It is possible to employ different sets of KRS's for modeling user queries and for modeling IO's. There is therefore a need for translation during the application of matching services. One approach to constructing such mappings involves the use of human experts working in a top-down manner, which is likely to be a time-consuming and controversial process. An approach that is promising in terms of automation involves bottom-up techniques based on empirical analyses of the use of language.

As a student, I do research most of the time. Through digital library, I don’t need to go to the library, refer to the card catalog and find the book to get the information that I need. I will just simply refer to the digital libraries over the Internet. It is my responsibility to use this technology advantage well for better, but still don’t forget to give credits and importance to traditional library and its ways.