Knowledge Organization Research in the last two decades: 1988-2008

We apply an automatic topic mapping system to records of publications in knowledge organization published between 1988-2008. The data was collected from journals publishing articles in the KO field from Web of Science database (WoS). The results showed that while topics in the first decade (1988-1997) were more traditional, the second decade (1998-2008) was marked by a more technological orientation and by the appearance of more specialized topics driven by the pervasiveness of the Web environment

Big Data, Big machines, Big Science : vers une société sans sujet et sans causalité ?

International audienceLes dernières " avancées " en matière des Technologies de l'information et de la communication (TIC) ont accéléré la virtualisation de nombreux secteurs d'activité. Le Big Data, le Cloud computing, l'Open Data et le web participatif entraînent des bouleversements importants en science et en société. Un des effets qui suscite de l'inquiétude est le recours croissant aux algorithmes de traitement des données massives (Big data) comme mode de pilotage des affaires. Le Big data a normalisé et entériné un certains nombre de paradoxes qui méritent que l'on s'y arrête pour en expliciter toutes les implications non seulement pour la science mais aussi pour la société

The French Conception of Information science. "Une exception française"?

International audienceThe French conception of Information science is often contrasted to the Anglophone one, which is perceived as different and rooted mainly in Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. While there is such thing as a French conception of information science, this conception is not totally divorced from the Anglophone one. Unbeknownst to researchers from the two geographical and cultural regions, they share similar conceptions of the field and invoke similar theoretical foundations, in particular the socio-constructivist theory. There is also a convergence of viewpoints on the dual nature of information science, i.e., the fact that it is torn between two competing paradigms - objectivist and subjectivist. Technology is another area where a convergence of viewpoints is noticeable: scholars from both geographic and cultural zones display the same suspicion towards the role of technology and of computer science. It would therefore be misleading to uphold the view that Anglophone information science is essentially objectivist and technicist while the French conception is essentially social and rooted in the humanities. This paper highlights converging analyses from authors based in both linguistic and geographical regions with the aim to foster a better understanding of the challenges that information science is facing worldwide and to help trace a path to how the global information science community can try to meet them

The impact of geographic location on the development of a specialty field. A case study on Sloan Digital Sky Survey in Astronomy.

International audienceWe analyze the scientific discourse of researchers in a specialty field in Astronomy by examining the influence that geographic location may have on the development of this field. Using as a case study the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) pro- ject, we analyzed texts from bibliographic records along three geographic axes: US-only publications, non-US publications and international collaboration. Each geographic region reflected authors affiliated to research institutions in that region. Interna- tional collaboration refers to papers published by both US-based and non-US based institutions. Through clustering of domain terms used in titles and abstracts fields of the bibliographic records, we were able to automatically identify the topology of to- pics peculiar to each geographic region and identify the research topics common to the three geographic zones. The results showed that US-only and non-US research in SDSS shared more commonalities with international collaboration than with one another, thus indicating that the former two focused on rather distinct topics

Inclusion lexicale et proximité sémantique entre termes.

International audienceNous étudions l'influence de l'inclusion lexicale sur la proximité sémantique entre termes. A partir de l'analyse des relations entre termes d'une ressource terminologique existante, lexicalement inclus dans ceux issus d'un corpus, nous formulons des hypothèses des relations engendrées. Ces hypothèses nous permettent de proposer un ordonnancement automatique des variantes des termes trouvées dans le corpus, par probabilité de proximité sémantique décroissante. Les premières expérimentations montrent que la prise en compte d'indices morpho-lexicaux comme la présence de noms composés, de noms propres et le nombre d'éléments ajoutés sont des critères à prendre en compte pour classer les variantes d'un même terme

Whither Information Science in France?

International audienceInformation science (IS) in France forms part of an inter-discipline named 'Information & Communication Sciences' (ICS), officially recognized as an academic discipline in the French higher education system in 1972. There is a diffuse belief among its academic community that the Anglophone conception of IS is very different from theirs because it is supposedly rooted in Shannon's mathematical theory of communication while the French conception is more rooted in the social sciences and humanities, owing to the literary origins of its founding figures (Robert Escarpit, Roland Barthes, Jean Meyriat). However, a review of the international literature shows that there are no profound distinctions in theories and paradigms underlying research in IS whether undertaken by French or by Anglophone researchers. The differences that do exist are surface level, due mainly to political and institutional factors. These factors also account for the poor state of IS in France today. Indeed, the institutional recognition and development of the field was not grounded upon the foundational works of the pioneers of documentation and IS in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Paul Otlet, Henri Lafontaine, Suzanne Briet). Another factor which has had a lasting impact on the French IS landscape were the inconsistent government policies implemented from the early 1970s till the late 1990s which led to a narrowing down of focus of IS to Scientific and technical information (STI) only, thus orienting the field towards a technological agenda. This in turn affected the direction higher education training and research took in the first three decades. Finally, but not the least adverse factor, the cohabitation of IS with communication science in the same inter-discipline has made it more difficult for the former to affirm its identity and exist as a recognized academic field in France

The landscape of Information Science: 1996-2008

International audienceWe propose a methodology combining symbolic and numeric information to map the structure of research in Information Science between 1996-2008. The visualization of the resulting maps showed that while the two-camp structure of Information Science observed in previous studies is still valid, other research poles like web and user-oriented studies are building bridges between the two hitherto isolated poles

Semantic metadata annotation. Tagging Medline abstracts for enhanced information access.

International audiencePurpose - The object of this study is to develop methods for automatically annotating the argumentative role of sentences in scientific abstracts. Working from Medline abstracts, sentences were classified into four major argumentative roles: objective, method, result, and conclusion. The idea is that, if the role of each sentence can be marked up, then these metadata can be used during information retrieval to seek particular types of information such as novelty, conclusions, methodologies, aims/goals of a scientific piece of work. Design/methodology/approach - Two approaches were tested: linguistic cues and positional heuristics. Linguistic cues are lexico-syntactic patterns modelled as regular expressions implemented in a linguistic parser. Positional heuristics make use of the relative position of a sentence in the abstract to deduce its argumentative class. Findings - The experiments showed that positional heuristics attained a much higher degree of accuracy on Medline abstracts with an F-score of 64 per cent, whereas the linguistic cues only attained an F-score of 12 per cent. This is mostly because sentences from different argumentative roles are not always announced by surface linguistic cues. Research limitations/implications - A limitation to the study was the inability to test other methods to perform this task such as machine learning techniques which have been reported to perform better on Medline abstracts. Also, to compare the results of the study with earlier studies using Medline abstracts, the different argumentative roles present in Medline had to be mapped on to four major argumentative roles. This may have favourably biased the performance of the sentence classification by positional heuristics. Originality/value - To the best of one's knowledge, this study presents the first instance of evaluating linguistic cues and positional heuristics on the same corpus

Information Science in the web era: a term-based approach to domain mapping.

International audienceWe propose a methodology for mapping the research in Information Science (IS) field based on a combined use of symbolic (linguistic) and numeric information. Using the same list of 12 IS journals as in earlier studies on this same topic (White & McCain 1998 ; Zhao & Strotmann 2008a&b), we mapped the structure of research in IS for two consecutive periods: 1996-2005 and 2006-2008. We focused on mapping the content of scientific publications from the title and abstract fields of underlying publications. The labels of clusters were automatically derived from titles and abstracts of scientific publications based on linguistic criteria. The results showed that while Information Retrieval (IR) and Citation studies continued to be the two structuring poles of research in IS, other prominent poles have emerged: webometrics in the first period (1996-2005) evolved into general web studies in the second period, integrating more aspects of IR research. Hence web studies and IR are more interwoven. There is still persistence of user studies in IS but now dispersed among the web studies and the IR poles. The presence of some recent trends in IR research such as automatic summarization and the use of language models were also highlighted by our method. Theoretic research on "information science" continue to occupy a smaller but persistence place. Citation studies on the other hand remains a monolithic block, isolated from the two other poles (IR and web studies) save for a tenuous link through user studies. Citation studies have also recently evolved internally to accommodate newcomers like "h-index, Google scholar and the open access model". All these results were automatically generated by our method without resorting to manual labeling of specialties nor reading the publication titles. Our results show that mapping domain knowledge structures at the term level offers a more detailed and intuitive picture of the field as well as capturing emerging trends

Repérage et annotation d'indices de nouveautés dans les écrits scientifiques

International audienceThis paper deals with thecategorisation of textual cues in scientific abstracts with the aim to highlight the information contained while for exploring huge volumes of texts. Typically, one context of application is the rapid identification by an expert of strategic information for science and technology watch. From a study of a sample of abstracts in english, novelty, objective, result and conclusion cues are formalized as finite state automata and projected on a test corpus. Resultats show that using these cues is relevant. Using the type of cues identified and the supposed information announced, an XML markup of scientific abstracts is proposed. The final aim is to guide the reader towards information categories classified as such which can assist science and technology watch process.Cet article explore la catégorisation des indices textuels présents dans les résumés scientifiques afin de mettre en valeur les informations véhiculées lors de l'exploration de grandes masses de textes. Typiquement, un des contextes d'application est le repérage rapide par un utilisateur expert des informations à caractère stratégique pour la veille scientifique et technologique. Après étude d'un échantillon de résumes scientifiques en anglais, les indices de nouveautés, d'objectif, de résultats et de conclusions sont formalisés et projetés sur un deuxième corpus de test. Les résultats montrent que ces indices sont globalement ''performants'. S'appuyant sur les indices repérés et du type d'information véhiculée, un balisage XML des résumés est proposé. L'objectif est de guider le lecteur vers les catégories d'information balisées en tant que telles, susceptibles de contribuer au processus de veille scientifique et technologique