The Wonderful World of Search

Search is such a wonderful and widely debated issue. To me there are three main kinds of search and each is accomplished in different ways.

Assume that we have an article indexed with the terms appropriate to the content of that article. These terms are specific to the content, the terms applied are not broad categories unless the article itself is broad. we put limits in the rule base on broad terms so they do not get over productive in search results.

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Access Innovations Teams with Public Library of Science (PLOS) to Enhance Depth and Breadth of Information Retrieval

Albuquerque, NM — Access Innovations, a leading firm in information retrieval, has teamed with the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a non-profit multi-disciplinary publisher and advocacy organization, to create a customized thesaurus to enhance search retrieval. The new, NISO Z39.19-compliant thesaurus includes more than 10,000 terms and 3,300 synonyms, which will enhance search retrieval tenfold.…

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Points of Knowledge

To deal with a large body of knowledge, we need to localize and organize it somehow. Where that knowledge is located, or where and how it is organized, or the system by which it is identified and perhaps indexed, might be called the points of knowledge. And certainly, databases connected to and/or indexed with knowledge organization systems represent points of knowledge.

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A Short History of Thesauri

We know of one Sanskrit thesaurus, the Amarakosha (Treasury or Dictionary of Amara), written by Buddhist scholar Amara Simha around 375 or 400 AD. Interestingly, it was written in verse. (The only other terminology in verse I can think of offhand is the one-L lama one by Ogden Nash, but I don’t think that bears comparison to the Amarakosha.)

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Ranganathan, Classification, and British Toys

I’ve mentioned Ranganathan briefly in some earlier posts. Let’s look at his innovations and influence from a historical perspective. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (1892-1972) was an Indian mathematician and librarian. His academic training was in mathematics, in which subject he earned two degrees. He taught mathematics and wrote several articles on the history of mathematics. These articles worked to…

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Theory of Knowledge: 19th and 20th Century Developments

In the 19th century, the study of the nature of knowledge came to be known as epistemology. The term was introduced by Scottish metaphysic James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864). Epistemological writers explored how knowledge relates to connected notions, such as belief and truth. They also considered the means of production of knowledge. And to a large extent, they embraced skepticism. a mode of thinking that required information to be well supported by evidence before it could be accepted as fact, i.e., knowledge.

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Theory of Knowledge: 18th Century Developments

Last time, we mentioned biological taxonomy. This leads us inevitably to Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish zoologist and botanist. We regard him as the “father of modern taxonomy.” Contrary to popular belief, Linnaeus did not invent the binomial nomenclature system, with organism types designated by genus and species. That honor belongs to the Bauhin brothers, Gaspar (1560-1624) and Johann (1541-1613). The two Swiss brothers formalized the then-existing method of (often vague and wordy) polynomial nomenclature, introducing a stricter, more logical system with one word for the genus and one for the species.

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Theory of Knowledge: The Age of Enlightenment

The 17th century ushered in some new ways of thinking about knowledge. One of the 17th-century philosophers who studied the nature of knowledge (among many other things) was René Descartes (1596-1650), who concerned himself with the nature of knowledge (among many other things).

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