Obligations of States Contributing to UN Peacekeeping Missions under Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions

Purpose - This paper seeks to outline the central role of concepts in the knowledge universe, and the intertwining roles of works, instantiations, and documents. In particular the authors are interested in ontological and epistemological aspects of concepts and in the question to which extent there is a need for natural languages to link concepts to create meaningful patterns. Design/methodology/approach - The authors describe the quest for the smallest elements of knowledge from a historical perspective. They focus on the metaphor of the universe of knowledge and its impact on classification and retrieval of concepts. They outline the major components of an elementary theory of knowledge interaction. Findings - The paper outlines the major components of an elementary theory of knowledge interaction that is based on the structure of knowledge rather than on the content of documents, in which semantics becomes not a matter of synonymous concepts, but rather of coordinating knowledge structures. The evidence is derived from existing empirical research. Originality/value - The paper shifts the bases for knowledge organization from a search for a universal order to an understanding of a universal structure within which many context‐dependent orders are possible

Likeness and Likeliness: Exploring Multidimensional Classification for the Multiverse of Information

In previous studies grouped under the common denominator "Idea Collider," the CERN Hadron-Collider was used as a metaphor to explore the meaning of breaking down existing structured and less-structured clusters of information into the finest particles to get a better understanding of the laws and nature of the universe of knowledge (Heuvel and Smiraglia, 2010). Moreover we compared past conceptualizations and visualizations of multidimensional classifications, in particular of faceted systems, and tried to assess their potential for future information retrieval (Heuvel 2011; Heuvel and Akdag Salah, 2011). Where most classification theories focused on knowledge integration in a single universe of knowledge, we outlined the framework of an elementary theory of knowledge interaction in a multiverse of knowledge (Smiraglia, Heuvel and Dousa 2011). We believe that similar to the real universe, not only matter, but also energy and gravitational forces are of importance for understanding the multiverse of information better. For that reason we want to elaborate on the question of how one perceives and interacts with knowledge production

UDC in Action

The UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) is not only a classification language with a long history; it also presents a complex cognitive system worthy of the attention of complexity theory. The elements of the UDC: classes, auxiliaries, and operations are combined into symbolic strings, which in essence represent a complex networks of concepts. This network forms a backbone of ordering of knowledge and at the same time allows expression of different perspectives on various products of human knowledge production. In this paper we look at UDC strings derived from the holdings of libraries. In particular we analyse the subject headings of holdings of the university library in Leuven, and an extraction of UDC numbers from the OCLC WorldCat. Comparing those sets with the Master Reference File, we look into the length of strings, the occurrence of different auxiliary signs, and the resulting connections between UDC classes. We apply methods and representations from complexity theory. Mapping out basic statistics on UDC classes as used in libraries from a point of view of complexity theory bears different benefits. Deploying its structure could serve as an overview and basic information for users among the nature and focus of specific collections. A closer view into combined UDC numbers reveals the complex nature of the UDC as an example for a knowledge ordering system, which deserves future exploration from a complexity theoretical perspective.Comment: Accepted for the UDCC seminar 201