Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas

Super-science, fundamental dimension, way of being: Library and information science in an age of messages. With critique from Rafael Capurro

This is a blog post containing the somewhat revised text of a chapter published in a Festschrift for Rafael Capurr, with comments from Capurro on our chapter

Smoother pebbles and the shoulders of giants: the developing foundations of information science

Some developments in the information science discipline over a period of 30 years are discussed, by selecting topics covered in the early issues of Journal of Information Science, and tracing their influence on subsequent developments, largely though by no means exclusively through JIS papers. Five main themes are covered: the information discipline per se; the foundations of that discipline; the nature of information; relations between discipline and profession; and education for information science. The continuing resonance of the writings of Farradane and Brookes is noted

Curating the infosphere: Luciano Floridi's Philosophy of Information as the foundation for Library and Information Science

The purpose of this editorial review is to re-examine the prospect that Luciano Floridi's Philosophy of Information (PI), and information ethics (IE) may serve as the conceptual foundation for library and information science (LIS), and that LIS may thus be seen as applied PI. This re-examination is timely, fifteen years after this proposal was first made, in light of the development and wider acceptance of the PI concept itself, of advances in information technologies and changes in the information environment, and of the consequent, and continuing, need for LIS to re-evaluate its nature and role. We first give a brief and selective account of the introduction and consequent reception of the idea of PI as the basis for LIS; more detailed account of the origins of PI, and its initial reception within LIS, have been given by Furner (2010), by Fyffe (2015), and by Van der Veer Martens (2015). Then we consider whether such a basis is, in fact, needed, and, if so, what the other possibilities might be, and then examine five particular aspects of the relation between LIS and PI. The conclusions, for those who do not make to the end, are that such a foundation is indeed needed, and that PI is the most appropriate basis

Teorijsko-filozofsko utemeljenje knjižnične i informacijske znanosti u filozofiji informacije

Cilj. Cilj je rada prikazati te provesti kritičku analizu konceptualnog opsega i potencijalnog dosega filozofije informacije Luciana Floridija kao pokušaja teorijsko-filozofskog utemeljenja knjižnične i informacijske znanosti. Filozofska i intelektualna utemeljenost znanstvene discipline ključni je čimbenik njezine znanstvene snage, statusa i identiteta, a upravo za knjižničnu i informacijsku znanost moguće je iznijeti konstataciju da konsenzus o filozofskim premisama te discipline ne postoji, što donosi brojne posljedice poput krize identiteta ili propitivanja njezine znanstvene snage. Pristup/metodologija/dizajn. Primjenom kvalitativnog pristupa analize literature ispituju se temeljni koncepti Floridijevih radova koji se suprotstavljaju ranijim filozofskim pristupima u knjižničnoj i informacijskoj znanosti te propituju s afirmativnih i kritičkih stajališta. Rezultati. Obrazloženo je zašto raniji pokušaji filozofskog utemeljenja discipline, poput Popperove teorije o tri svijeta i socijalne epistemologije, ne mogu pružiti zadovoljavajuće teorijsko utemeljenje knjižničnoj i informacijskoj znanosti. Na temelju analize kritičkog i afirmativnog pristupa ideji o knjižničnoj i informacijskoj znanosti kao primijenjenoj filozofiji informacije i ključnih Floridijevih koncepata koji su ekvivalentni problemskim težištima koje je iznjedrilo suvremeno kompleksno informacijsko okruženje, donosi se zaključak o filozofiji informacije kao produktivnom uporištu za teorijsko utemeljenje knjižnične i informacijske znanosti. Originalnost/vrijednost. Rad pozicionira knjižničnu i informacijsku znanost u konceptualni prostor filozofije informacije. Pritom polazi od konstatacije o krizi identiteta u informacijskim disciplinama i prepoznaje upravo filozofiju informacije kao uporište teorijsko-filozofskog utemeljenja koje je neophodno u prevladavanju krize. Rad ujedno popunjava relativnu prazninu u hrvatskoj literaturi u kojoj Floridijevi koncepti i pogled na knjižničnu i informacijsku znanost nisu detaljnije obrađivani

Information's magic numbers: the numerology of information science

A chapter in a Festschrift for the occasion of Blaise Cronin's retirement, this chapter reflects Cronin's concerns that undue focus on informetrics may lead the information science discipline to descend into a “new age of numerology. So It reflects on the ways in which a few numbers may helpfully encapsulate important aspects of the subject

Pojav tehnološke triade: opisni pojem današnje totalne realnosti

Scientific discourse refers to triads as conceptual structures whose purpose is to emphasize the connection between concepts included in the description of a certain phenomenon. The famous Popper’s triad is comprised of the world of physical objects and processes (World 1), the world of mental objects, i.e. subjective human experience (World 2) and the world of objective knowledge (World 3), which can be thought of as all the products of thought – the world of information, knowledge, scientific theories, literature, etc. During the past half-century, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and new media began to change our reality on all three levels. Using a comparative analysis, this paper will examine the impact ICT and new media have on the Popper’s World 1, 2 and 3. As it will be shown, the modern age offers a new conceptual triad the aim of which is not to stand against the Popper’s triad but to introduce new integral elements that intersect and interact with it. In this new triad the world of physical objects is being replaced by the world of virtual reality (i.e. the Virtual World), the world of mental objects is replaced by transmental objects (i.e. the Transmental World) and the world of objective knowledge is being replaced by the world of digitized data/information/knowledge in the context of developing AI (i.e. the Digital World). These new architectonic elements build new conceptual structure the aim of which is to define, describe and represent new interrelated concepts essential for better understanding of today’s totality of reality. They form new ontology of the world which describes reality as inseparable from the concepts of information and technology

A Two-Level Identity Model To Support Interoperability of Identity Information in Electronic Health Record Systems.

The sharing and retrieval of health information for an electronic health record (EHR) across distributed systems involves a range of identified entities that are possible subjects of documentation (e.g., specimen, clinical analyser). Contemporary EHR specifications limit the types of entities that can be the subject of a record to health professionals and patients, thus limiting the use of two level models in healthcare information systems that contribute information to the EHR. The literature describes several information modelling approaches for EHRs, including so called “two level models”. These models differ in the amount of structure imposed on the information to be recorded, but they generally require the health documentation process for the EHR to focus exclusively on the patient as the subject of care and this definition is often a fixed one. In this thesis, the author introduces a new identity modelling approach to create a generalised reference model for sharing archetype-constrained identity information between diverse identity domains, models and services, while permitting reuse of published standard-based archetypes. The author evaluates its use for expressing the major types of existing demographic reference models in an extensible way, and show its application for standards-compliant two-level modelling alongside heterogeneous demographics models. This thesis demonstrates how the two-level modelling approach that is used for EHRs could be adapted and reapplied to provide a highly-flexible and expressive means for representing subjects of information in allied health settings that support the healthcare process, such as the laboratory domain. By relying on the two level modelling approach for representing identity, the proposed design facilitates cross-referencing and disambiguation of certain demographics standards and information models. The work also demonstrates how it can also be used to represent additional clinical identified entities such as specimen and order as subjects of clinical documentation

Il terzo mondo di Popper e i mentefatti

POPPER’S THIRD WORLD AND MENTEFACTS The philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) theorized the existence, alongside the physical world of matter and the psychological world of thought, of a ‘third world’ reserved for the ‘objective knowledge’ contained in theories, narratives, technologies, works of art and other creations (especially, but not exclusively, the abstract ones) of human beings, not entirely reducible - in his opinion - to the corresponding psychic phenomena that occur in the minds of certain people. This theory, rather fortunate in the field of information sciences, however, involves many inconsistencies and implausibility, largely due to the excessively disparate types of content that Popper, in his numerous writings on the subject, places within his third world. Among the various attempts to resize, rationalize and make Popper’s third world more coherent and usable, it is particularly promising (although not entirely problem-free) the one linked to the concept (chronologically prior to Popper's theory) of ‘mentefact’, outlined by the sociologist Earle Edward Eubank (1887-1945), introduced in information sciences by Barbara Kyle (1913-1966) and recently revived by Claudio Gnoli in two articles published in 2018 and 2019. Mentefacts, for Eubank, Kyle and Gnoli, are all abstract (or immaterial) entities created by human beings, which are opposed to concrete (or material) objects built by humans themselves, called ‘artefacts’, and which should not be confused with the corresponding psychological phenomena, which are merely subjective. A typical relationship between artefacts and mentefacts of particular interest for information sciences is the one which identifies intentional human documents in the union of an artefact (physical carrier) with a mentefact (information content)