Ethical warrant for global knowledge systems

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A proposed ethical warrant for global knowledge representation and organization

systems
Clare Beghtol
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A proposed ethical warrant

for global knowledge
representation and
organization systems
Clare Beghtol
Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto,

Ontario, Canada
Proposed
ethical warrant
507
Received 12 November
2001
Revised 19 March 2002
Accepted 6 May 2002
Keywords Information systems, National cultures, User satisfaction, Ethics

Abstract New technologies have made the increased globalization of information resources and
services possible. In this situation, it is ethically and intellectually beneficial to protect cultural and
information diversity. This paper analyzes the problems of creating ethically based globally
accessible and culturally acceptable knowledge representation and organization systems, and
foundation principles for the ethical treatment of different cultures are established on the basis of
the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The concept of ``cultural
hospitality'', which can act as a theoretical framework for the ethical warrant of knowledge
representation and organization systems, is described. This broad discussion is grounded with an
extended example of one cultural universal, the concept of time and its expression in calendars.
Methods of achieving cultural and user hospitality in information systems are discussed for their
potential for creating ethically based systems. It is concluded that cultural hospitality is a
promising concept for assessing the ethical foundations of new knowledge representation and
organization systems and for planning revisions to existing systems.
Introduction
Representing and organizing knowledge is not a straightforward process. How
best to characterize the physical and intellectual attributes of books and other
physical media was debated well before the advent of computerization, and the
invention and popularization of non-physical information carriers have neither
simplified the questions nor resolved the debates. In addition, to the problems
of physical and non-physical media, we need now to add problems of providing
access to information globally and locally in any language, for any individual,
culture, ethnic group or domain, at any location, at any time and for any
purpose. These requirements have socio-cultural components that were not
widely or fully anticipated when the information age began. Now, however, we
need to examine their ramifications because new information technologies are
developing rapidly. In particular, broad questions about the ethical dimensions
of knowledge representation and organization in the context of global access to
information have arisen. These issues are no easier and may in fact be harder
This research was partially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada (SSHRC) grant number 410-2001-0108. Research assistance was provided by Ann
Simonds and Anna Slawek. I wish also to thank the anonymous referees, whose thoughtful
comments have resulted in an improved paper.
Journal of Documentation,
Vol. 58 No. 5, 2002, pp. 507-532.
# MCB UP Limited, 0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/00220410210441568
JDOC
58,5
508
to resolve than previous questions about organizing physical media for

individual libraries within particular cultural contexts.
The general purpose of this paper is to delineate issues involved in the
design of information systems that are based on ethical principles and to
explore the implications of those issues for some aspects of information
retrieval systems, particularly for knowledge representation and organization
systems, in world-wide information environments. To this end, a number of
threads are explored. Specifically, the paper poses the questions:
(1) What is meant by the globalization of information and knowledge?
(2) What are the ethical dimensions of the representation and organization
of knowledge?
(3) What relationships obtain between these ethical dimensions and
globalization?
(4) What implications do these ethical dimensions have for the practical
development and maintenance of systems and what would a practical
solution look like?
(5) What theoretical concepts need to be developed to underpin an ethically
based knowledge representation and organization system so that we can
assess whether we have achieved an ethically acceptable system?
These are complicated questions that, of necessity, overlap. For this reason,
and to illustrate the issues concretely, the general discussion is augmented by
an extended example of the socio-cultural dimensions of the concept of time
and of its expression in different calendars.
Globalization, culture and knowledge representation
In discussing the relationship between the spread of information technology
and capitalism, Hassan (1999) distinguished between two dimensions of
globalization. According to Hassan (1999), `òutward globalization'' refers to the
expansion of information technology physically into geographic space, and
`ìnward globalization'' refers to the expansion of technology and the
consequent dissemination of information into cultural, social and intellectual
space. Cogburn (1998) also distinguished between two levels of globalization:
(1) a fundamental level based in the economic realm of production and
distribution; and
(2) a secondary level based in the social, political, and cultural processes of
different groups.
Hassan's (1999) concept of inward globalization and Cogburn's (1998) concept
of social globalization are analogous concepts that, taken together, adequately
represent the consensus of a number of other authors (Smith, 2001; De Mul,
1999) about the existence and the types of globalization may that result from
the spread of electronic information technologies.
This paper is concerned primarily with the inward, cultural, and social
aspects of the globalization of technology and of information dissemination.
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that the outward, physical,
economically based globalization of technology is incomplete and that large
areas of the world have little acquaintance with current technological
information capabilities. For example, Ferreiro (1997) pointed out that Latin
America has a generally poor tradition of literacy and print culture, insufficient
numbers of computers, and, in some cases, few telephone lines with which to
connect to the rest of the world even if computers were readily available. In
addition, computer technology itself is not free of cultural values (Brey, 1999;
Gleason, 1999; Hassan, 1999). This lack of mutual exclusivity between the
physical and cultural aspects of information globalization means that the
discussion cannot be confined to the non-technical consequences of global
expansion in relation to knowledge representation and organization systems.
The concept of culture is transdisciplinary and describes in general the
various phenomena that make up the collective beliefs and activities of some
group of people. Discussions of culture commonly refer to shared values,
history, language, collective memory, social attitudes, preferences and
practices, among others. National cultures generally conform to a nation's
geographic boundaries. An ethnic culture, however, can exist within the
geographic boundaries of a number of different national cultures. Furthermore,
smaller socio-cultural units and activities (such as religious, educational or
economic organizations and institutions, Internet discussion groups, and the
various arts domains) may exist within one national culture and/or cross
national and/or ethnic boundaries. In this broad sense, cultures are created:
. . . wherever human beings live and/or work together in groups over a considerable period of
time and . . . share a common history. It is therefore possible to speak of different layers of
culture (Steinwachs, 1999, p. 195).
It follows, then, that each individual may potentially belong to a number of

different cultures at many different levels. For example, a person may live in
one country, speak the language(s) of another country(ies), adhere to the
policies of a certain political party, adhere to and practice a certain religion,
and/or belong to social organizations that cross national and/or ethnic
boundaries. On whatever level of whatever layer of a culture a person acts at a
particular moment, it seems clear that the:
. . . capacity to be influenced by the specific culture of a given social group is an important
part of what it means to be human (Moody-Adams, 1994, p. 291).
It also seems clear that individual members of a culture may legitimately

disagree about issues relating to that culture, that different layers and levels of
different cultures may exist more or less comfortably within one individual,
and that an individual may consider him- or herself to belong to the core of
some culture(s) and to the fringe(s) of others. In addition, the boundaries among
cultures can themselves be fuzzy and can create cultural tensions or conflicts
within an individual as well as among larger discourse and/or social
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communities (Luhrman, 2000). Thus, like societies themselves, individuals may

be multicultural in the same ways that they may be multilingual or participate
in multidisciplinary activities.
The behaviour of cultures can be described with many of the same terms
used to describe various kinds of fields of endeavour, such as academic and/or
institutional disciplines and/or other domains (Beghtol, 1995; Klein, 1990).
Cultures, like other social units, merge, split, borrow, intersect, clash, jockey for
position and vigorously defend their own boundaries. Cultures are not static or
inert. Indeed, the legacies of a culture (whether national, ethnic, religious,
disciplinary or based on some other principle) persist:
. . . only because individual persons capable of responsible action . . . choose, whether
critically or uncritically, to protect and perpetuate that legacy (Moody-Adams, 1994,
pp. 292-3).
Thus, the extent of the cultural globalization of technology and information can
be controlled by responsible human beings at any of the micro- or macro-levels
of the process if they have the political and/or moral will or power to enforce
their beliefs or the persuasive ability to win others over to their point of view. In
addition, however, the large-scale assumptions, beliefs and dimensions of a
culture (or of narrower groups within or across cultures) may not be readily
visible to the members of its communities of practice (Bowker and Star, 1999).
The converse, then, follows. Gradual and/or subtle threats to cultural
parameters may not be immediately or clearly obvious to members of the
culture. Similar integrative and/or divisive processes seem likely to operate at
the level of an entire social group of whatever nature and/or at the deeper levels
and layers within it.
The relationships of a particular culture to its information needs and
systems are necessarily complex and many details are not clearly understood.
Many would agree, however, that ``humans are mortal information is
immortal'' (Yakovlev, 1998, p. 1) as long as the information has been passed on
orally or otherwise preserved or recorded. In this broad sense, information
what kinds of information people in a culture need and want, what they do with
it, to what extent they value it, and whether they choose to perpetuate one or
another of its various elements helps to define a culture. In this sense, a
culture resides in its information. It thus seems likely that:
Cultural differences shape the ways that various people relate to information and its role in
society (Smith, 2001, p. 534).
On narrower scales, similar assumptions and arguments have been made in

discussions of, for example, multicultural research teams (Day et al., 1995),
national cultures (Steinwachs, 1999), institutional cultures (Day, 2001),
librarianship (Alfino and Pierce, 2001) and other fields of endeavour,
disciplines, or domains (Beghtol, 2001a; 1995). It follows that attitudes and
assumptions about information will operate at whatever national, social and/or
geographic plane a culture has been formed within a society or within an
individual and will therefore inform individual decisions to whatever extent the
individual identifies with some cultural group, participates in its deliberations,

seeks to perpetuate it, and fears and responds to threats to its continuation.
In the literature of knowledge representation and organization, the
supposition that individuals in different cultures need different kinds of (and
avenues to) information has been called ``cultural warrant'' (Beghtol, 2001b;
1986). The term is based on Hulme's (1911a, b, c; 1912a, b) term ``literary
warrant'' and was coined by Lee (1976). Cultural warrant means that any kind
of knowledge representation and/or organization system can be maximally
appropriate and useful for the individuals in some culture only if it is based on
the assumptions, values, and predispositions of that same culture. Conversely,
if a system is not based on those assumptions, it will be appropriate and useful
to some lesser extent for the individuals in the culture. For example, the use of a
book classification from a later historical period to explicate lost texts from an
earlier period that used a different book classification system creates scholarly
difficulties because:
. . . classification systems are intellectual, and fundamentally also political, constructs: they
represent, and impose, a view of the world at a certain time and in a certain environment
(Dudbridge, 2000, p. 12).
The same is true of other kinds of knowledge representation and organization

systems.
In this sense and for this reason, any successful implicit or explicit
information and/or knowledge representation and organization system is a
cultural artefact. These kinds of cultural artefacts, although not necessarily
physical objects and probably not entirely perceptible to the members of a
culture, exert a powerful influence on individuals within that culture (Bowker
and Star, 1999; Ellen, 1979). It follows that individuals outside a certain culture
are less likely to be influenced by that culture and its assumptions and more
likely to be influenced by their own culture of choice and its assumptions. In
this paper, to recognize the complexity of the relationship(s) among individuals
and cultures, the term ``cultural warrant'' is taken to include the concept of `ùser
warrant'' (Albrechtsen and Jacob, 1998; Fraser, 1978). User warrant refers to the
collaboration of potential users, either directly or indirectly, in the development
and use of any knowledge management system, including knowledge
representation and organization systems (Patterson et al., 2000). The
containment of user warrant within cultural warrant is justified on the
assumptions that individuals are considered to be members of a certain
culture(s), as discussed above, and that they act as representatives of one or
another culture(s) when participating in the development and use of
information systems.
This multiplicity of cultures that are made up of individuals with varying
attitudes towards information and knowledge and that operate with varying,
perhaps conflicting, cultural warrants increases the complexity of representing
and organizing knowledge to render it globally suitable for all users in all
situations in all cultures. Before widespread computerization, debate often
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focused on comparing the local advantages and disadvantages of standard and

non-standard systems of various kinds. Discussions of, for example,
classification systems focused on decisions concerning the choice between a
general classification system for all knowledge and a special classification
system for a single field (Ranganathan, 1965a) and on the best techniques for
developing a classification for any field (Classification Research Group, 1955).
More recently, these issues have narrowed to, for example, analyses of possible
techniques for classifying discrete phenomena within a discipline-based
classification (Thomas, 1992), the integration of different intracultural points of
view into a standard general bibliographic classification system (Olson and
Ward, 1997), and the treatment of multidisciplinary works in classification
systems (Beghtol, 1998). Particular issues for special local systems include
techniques of domain analysis (Pejtersen and Albrechtsen, 2000) and methods
for creating ontologies both for knowledge management within a specific
organization (Noy and Hafner, 2000) and for various kinds of knowledge
(Jonassen, 2000). In the broader field of knowledge representation and
organization in general, the development of metadata systems (American
Library Association, 1998a), their comparison and integration (Howarth, 2000),
crosswalks among them (Milstead and Feldman, 1999), and the potential
creation of a number of different surrogates for the same information unit
(Lagoze, 1997) have enlarged the scope of deliberations.
These changes in areas of debate and practice reflect both a broadening and
a deepening of questions about the appropriateness of various kinds of
standard/non-standard, global/local, and/or centralized/decentralized systems
for different purposes for different individuals at different times in different
cultures. At a further level of complexity, intertwined throughout these
changes is the intermingling, cross-fertilization and territoriality of the
institutional and domain cultures of the various information professions and of
the individuals who practise them (Beghtol, 2001a). How to resolve the tensions
among various kinds of access methods, how to incorporate potentially
antithetical cultural warrants into knowledge representation and organization
systems, how to integrate them with each other and how to negotiate among
their differing priorities are issues that raise noteworthy ethical, as well as
intellectual and technical, questions and problems.
Ethics, knowledge representation and organization and
globalization
New technologies create new kinds of ethical questions that may necessitate
new procedures for ethical evaluation (Brey, 1999; Belohlav et al., 1997). In this
situation, we need to identify and analyze these new ethical issues before we
can suggest viable design solutions to minimize their negative effects and
before we can develop methods to implement these ameliorating solutions in
actual information systems. Lange (1970) distinguished between two kinds of
questions about classification systems: those to which the answers are more
likely to be true or false, and those to which the answers are more likely to be
better or worse. According to Lange, true/false answers are those that refer to
the application of the system itself. Better/worse answers refer to
considerations beyond the system and invite evaluation of the system from
some external perspective. The same distinction may be fruitfully applied to
the answers to ethical questions. Some ethical questions invite true/false
answers referring to internal concerns of the system, and others invite better/
worse answers on the basis of matters that lie beyond the system. Because,
``when it comes to ethics, we are in the domain of preference or choice''
(Blackburn, 2001, p. 111), the answers to such broad ethical questions are by
definition not absolute. The preferences and choices implicit or explicit in
possible answers to these broad questions, and the larger values those choices
reflect, may be those of an individual, of an entire culture, or of some
combination of the two at any level of individuality or enculturation. The
discussions of ethical issues in this paper and in other papers on the topic are
subject to the same caveat.
We can expect, then, the main questions addressed in this paper to have
better/worse answers, not true/false ones. That is, our efforts are directed not
toward discovering the ``correct'' response to some ethical dilemma within one
ethical system, but toward identifying major ethical dilemmas that face any
knowledge representation and organization system in the context of the
ongoing development of the cultural globalization of information. This larger
context itself contains its own quota of ethical issues, and these also necessarily
exist in the domain of preference or choice. That larger domain in turn depends
on and is influenced by the levels and layers of the culture in which it operates
and by the extent of involvement of individuals in their various cultural and
personal endeavours. This persistent reference to broader contexts can
presumably continue indefinitely as long as the system(s) in question is of
sufficient complexity to be significant (Hofstadter, 1979).
In this paper, the tasks are to elucidate broadly the ethical components both
of cultural globalization and of knowledge representation and organization
systems and to discover where the ethical concerns of the two fields intersect.
From such an analysis, we may discover ways of building ethical perspectives
into the design, construction, maintenance and revision of knowledge
representation and organization systems for global access to information. We
seek, then, to combine some of the major ethical considerations of the two fields
to create what might be called a multiethical foundation that would constitute
an ethical warrant for globalized knowledge representation and organization
systems. One assumption of this endeavour is that knowledge representation
and organization systems should be based on ethical principles. A second
assumption is that the ethical context(s) of cultural globalization should
influence the design of ethically based knowledge representation and
organization systems. A third assumption is that any discussion (including this
one) contains ethical preferences that may or may not be as explicit as is
desirable. These kinds of assumptions position the investigation in the
category of applied ethics. Like all discussions of applied ethics, this
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investigation can base its appeal for validity on universal principles, on duties
and obligations, on rights, or on some combination of the three (Hannabus,
1998). In addition, a useful ethical framework for globalization needs to be
coherent, widely accepted, and applicable (Gleason, 1999).
Ethical issues for cultural globalization and for knowledge representation and
organization systems
Koehler and Pemberton (2000) studied the ethical codes of 37 associations of the
information professions and from these developed a model ethical code for
information professionals containing five elements:
(1) Whenever possible, place the needs of clients above other concerns.
(2) Understand the roles of the information practitioner and strive to meet
them with the greatest possible skill and competence.
(3) Support the needs of the profession and the professional association(s).
(4) Insofar as they do not conflict with professional obligations, be sensitive
and responsive to social responsibilities appropriate to the profession.
(5) Be aware of and be responsive to the rights of users, employers, fellow
practitioners, one's community, the larger society (Koehler and
Pemberton, 2000, p. 39).
These elements illustrate concretely the presence of preference and choice in
ethical decisions and, in addition, strongly imply potential tensions among
the various roles of the information professional. In general, the phrases
``whenever possible . . .'' and `ìnsofar as they do not conflict . . .'' demonstrate
the need for evaluating the competing demands of a number of the different
elements involved in ethical information work. In particular, the final point
requires information professionals to balance ethically the rights and needs
of five groups of people: users, employers, practitioners, community, and
society.
In Koehler and Pemberton's (2000) model ethical code, then, ethical
information practice is a decision-making process in which no concretes or
absolutes exist. Koehler and Pemberton's (2000) assumption is that each
information professional will be able to work out an ethically ``correct'' balance
among a number of priorities whenever an ethical decision must be made. That
is, they assume that individual information professionals will be able to
identify and carry out a solution that is better rather than worse, not
necessarily one that is true rather than false, in a particular situation for
whatever the ethical decision of the moment happens to be. This decisionmaking process is further complicated because each of the five groups for
which priorities must be balanced is composed of individuals who presumably
have their own multicultural backgrounds and multiethical priorities, as
discussed above.
This decision-making process can be grounded by establishing a larger
arena from which to make judgements about the ethical acceptability of an
information decision. What might be the foundations for such ethically better
information decisions when they have to be taken on a global scale? Froehlich
(1994, pp. 463-5) suggested that five general principles should guide ethical
action in all kinds of international research contexts:
Proposed
ethical warrant
(1) ``respect for the self and others'';

(2) ``seek to minimize harm'';
(3) ``seek justice or fairness'';
(4) promote ``social harmony''; and
(5) ``be faithful to organizational public and professional trust''.

In the more specific context of international information issues, Smith (2001)
presented the concept of global information justice (GIJ), which is based on the
United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, accessible
at http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm (visited 20 August 2001)). Smith
characterized GIJ as an ethical ideal, an analytic model, and an approach to
policy making. Of the six major themes in GIJ (Smith, 2001, p. 525, Fig. 6), the
two that are most relevant to this discussion are access (i.e. individual access to
information and to freedom of expression) and community (i.e. human dignity
and the right to human cultural development). Access is addressed in Article 19
of the UDHR:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression (Smith, 2001, p. 527).
As Smith (2001, p. 527) noted:

Without access to information it would be difficult to assure freedom of opinion and
expression.
Community is addressed in Article 27 of the UDHR:

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the
arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits (Smith, 2001, pp. 527-8).
In GIJ, in Articles 19 and 27, and in other articles of UDHR that are not
addressed here, the rights of both individuals and cultures are highlighted.
These general rights can be assumed to include various kinds of information
rights because of the importance of information in creating and transmitting
cultural values, as discussed above. As foundations for policy and decision
making, adherence to the goals of GIJ and UDHR cannot be enforced because
the United Nations has no governing authority. Nevertheless, according to
Smith (2001), the communications, information, and informatics (CII) division
of UNESCO can promote debate and encourage projects with these themes as a
framework. Patterson et al. (2000, p. 2, original emphasis) also promoted the
principles in the two UDHR articles quoted above and rephrased them as:
(1) ``Communication principle. The right of communications as a
fundamental human right''; and
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(2) ``Free expression principle. States should promote the right to free
expression and the right to receive information regardless of frontiers
[which can be taken to mean geographic, cultural and/or political
boundaries]''.
This paper is an attempt to promote debate about how to implement the ethical
principles of GIJ and UDHR in knowledge representation and organization
systems.
The principles of UDHR and GIJ combine universal principles, rights and
obligations as described by Hannabus (1998, p. 1):
(1) the principle of the same code of information ethics for the whole world;
(2) the individual and social rights to have access to information, to
communicate information, and to participate in the human community;
and
(3) the attendant obligations of individuals and communities, including
information professionals and their professional associations, to
preserve and promote these rights.
As an ethical framework, UDHR and GIJ appear to be coherent and widely
accepted, but whether they are applicable as required by Gleason (1999) in the
sense that they can be theoretically framed and practically implemented for
globally useful knowledge representation and organization systems is one of
the questions this paper addresses. Principles do not implement themselves.
As Buchanan (1999, p. 193) pointed out, the:
. . . growing intimacy [of globalization] . . . does not equate with equitable access and
dissemination of information.
What specific problems for knowledge representation and organization

systems would the adoption of the underlying principles of UDHR and GIJ need
to address? Brey (1999) identified two types of representation error that any
ethically based computer system should avoid, i.e. misrepresentation and
biased representation. Misrepresentation occurs when a representation does
not adhere to some accepted standard of accuracy (e.g. in engineering drawings
that will be used in construction). Biased representation occurs when the values
of stakeholders are not incorporated into the model (e.g. using stereotypes to
represent some social group).
Knowledge representation and organization systems have no accepted
standards of representational accuracy in Brey's (1999) strict sense
(Williamson, 1996), so misrepresentation does not occur. Biased representation,
however, does occur and has been recognized. The basic issues of ``the insidious
forms of domination embedded in cataloging and classification practices''
(Buchanan, 1999, p. 196) have been well-documented. These include, among
others, the political, religious, cultural, gender, and language assumptions that
are entrenched in the design and development of specific knowledge
representation and organization systems. In some cases, potential sources of
bias in, for example, bibliographic classification systems are being removed in
the interest of internationalization (Mitchell, 1997). Discussions of cataloguing
ethics, however, usually focus more narrowly on daily work issues such as
minimal level cataloguing and out-sourcing (Intner, 1993). With some
exceptions (Olson, 2001; 1996), issues of and techniques for combating
knowledge representation and organization biases have not been widely
investigated or debated.
Brey (1999, p. 13) suggested that removing biased representations from
computer systems ``will require the development of a methodology for the
recognition and avoidance of such biases'' and that the requirements to
recognize and avoid bias may be more difficult to fulfil in abstract domains
than they are in concrete domains, partially because abstract domains require
choices on ``what categories to group data in'' (Brey, 1999, p. 12). In the abstract
domains of knowledge representation and organization, in which decisions on
the appropriateness of categories predominate (Dudbridge, 2000), recognition
of bias depends on specialized techniques for detailed structural and semantic
analyses and on the constant interpretation and re-interpretation of specific
knowledge representation and organization systems and their underlying
assumptions. Removal of representational bias in old systems and the
avoidance of representational bias in new ones requires a theoretical
framework preferring system characteristics and methodologies that are rooted
in an `èthical environment'' (Blackburn, 2001, p. 1) and that favour non-biasing
techniques.
This analysis exposes a dilemma. As discussed above, knowledge
representation and organization systems are most useful when and if they
reflect the cultural warrant of a particular social group and are understandable
and acceptable to the individuals who belong to and seek to perpetuate that
group. Any coherent and cohesive culture relies on a large number of
assumptions about the world, about people, about society, about information,
and about ethics, among others. Each culture, at whatever level or layer
individuals may have embraced it, is automatically biased toward its own
assumptions and considers them to be fundamentally ``true'' in principle, if not
necessarily present in all cultural practices and activities and/or substantially
different from those of some other culture. At the same time, a knowledge
representation and/or organization system for global use can uphold the ethical
principles of UDHR and GIJ only if it contains no representations biased by
assumptions about the world, people, society, information, or ethics. Thus, the
cultural expansion of information technology generates major ethical
difficulties for the development of globally useful and appropriate knowledge
representation and organization systems because these, to be useable and
appropriate to individuals from different cultures, must be based on the
potentially conflicting warrants of those different cultures. ``Cultural specificity
demands respect'' (Buchanan, 1999, p. 199), but specificity for one culture may
conflict with the specificity of another culture(s). In this situation, the methods
for developing ethically based globalized knowledge representation and
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organization systems need to be universally valid and, therefore, non-culture

specific. A theoretical framework for the practical development of globally
acceptable and ethically based knowledge representation and organization,
then, needs ideally to be able to admit every point of view and every
assumption that cultures and the individuals within them can make, and, at the
same time, to remain valid and acceptable for individuals in entirely different,
perhaps conflicting or antithetical, cultures. Like other ideals, this ideal serves
as a goal and as a yardstick for evaluation, even though it may not be
completely achievable in practice.
The concept of ``hospitality''
Within what knowledge representation and organization framework(s) can
approaches to this practical ethical dilemma of the conflict(s) among different
cultures and the globalization of information be proposed? In the literature of
bibliographic classification, the term ``hospitality'' refers to the ability of a
classification notation to incorporate new concepts and to establish appropriate
semantic and syntactic relationships among the old and the new concepts. It
appears that both the intellectual and the ethical problems of globalization for
knowledge representation and organization systems can be approached by
broadening the scope of the concept of hospitality in two ways.
First, we may concentrate on techniques for adding new concepts to a
knowledge representation and organization system, not on developing
notational techniques for expressing them. Notational expression is a problem
peculiar to bibliographic classification systems but not to other kinds of
knowledge representation and organization systems. Second, we may include
not only the addition of new concepts, but also the addition of entirely different
cultural warrants that in turn may include entirely different user warrants.
That is, we need to make each knowledge representation and/or organization
system, which by definition is based on some cultural warrant, ``permeable''
(Olson, 1996, p. 9) to other cultural warrants and to the specific levels and
layers of individual user choice within each culture. The need to broaden the
concept of hospitality for global access arises because without it ``the richness
of difference will be replaced by the poverty of sameness'' (Buchanan, 1999,
p. 199). Such a ``monoculture'' (Yakovlev, 1998, p. 3) would conflict
fundamentally with the ethical principles of individual and community
freedom of access to information and to its culturally acceptable expression set
out by UDHR and GIJ that this paper accepts. Like the concept of cultural
warrant and for the same reasons, the concept of cultural hospitality includes
hospitality to the individual needs of specific users. Cultural hospitality that
allows for personal and community choice thus appears to provide a useful
term and a fruitful conceptual basis for the theoretical framework of an ethical
warrant for knowledge representation and organization systems and theories.
Modern librarianship and the other information professions have often
espoused neutrality toward materials (Trosow, 2001), and broadening the
concept of hospitality to include different cultural warrants is generally in
accordance with this neutrality (Sargent, 1993). The concept of cultural

hospitality appears to conflict, however, with other views of ethical behaviour
regarding cultural difference. Specifically, the concept of cultural hospitality
appears to conflict with the view that ethical behaviour requires criticism of
other cultures and that:
Proposed
ethical warrant
A readiness to engage in moral criticism and debate with the individuals who will perpetuate
a culture manifests the highest respect for that culture principally, of course, in virtue of
manifesting respect for the individual agents who must decide their culture's future
(Moody-Adams, 1994, p. 309).
519
Fully hospitable knowledge representation and organization systems for global

access that allow individuals to make cultural and personal choices in
information work, however, are not themselves engaged in debates about
ethics. Instead, the intention of the concept of cultural hospitality as an ethical
warrant is to respect individuals and cultures on a level that allows informed
debate about ethical questions among those individuals and cultures to take
place. Presumably, fruitful debate with those of other cultures cannot occur
whenever all individuals and all cultures do not have equitable access to
information and to the ability to create and/or disseminate it. For example,
attention is often drawn to the predominance of the English language on the
Internet as an instance of conscious or unconscious attempts at cultural
domination (Arsky and Cherny, 1998; Ferreiro, 1997). Hospitality to various
languages is an ethical requirement under the principles of UDHR and GIJ and
seems more likely to encourage debate about ethical principles than to suppress
it. In this way, the concept of cultural hospitality recontextualizes the aim of
neutrality in the information professions and posits it as one of the higher level
ethical desiderata for globalized information retrieval systems. Implementation
of cultural hospitality in knowledge representation and organization systems
would thus invite the comparisons that:
Rather than uncontrolled relativism, [are] the best guarantee against superficial
homogenization across national and cultural boundaries (Peirano, 1998, p. 128).
Viewed in this way, the concept of cultural hospitality provides a potentially

unifying theory of applied ethics for research that is being carried out currently
and for the ethically based design and ethical assessment of future projects.
Research into problems, for example, of multilingual and multicultural retrieval
(Peters and Picchi, 1997), of interoperable metadata (Bearman et al., 1998), of
thesaurus mapping (Doerr, 2000), and of authority control (Tillett, 2001) has
been undertaken on practical and technical levels outside an explicit ethical
framework. These projects, like all information work, are subject to the
influences of cultures at the various individual and societal layers and levels as
noted above. They all also rest, however, on the (usually unstated) assumption
that increased connections among systems, among individuals and among
cultures are globally valuable and achievable in principle. A coherent, widelyaccepted and applicable (Gleason, 1999) ethical framework is required because
without it the ethical foundations and qualities of any one project cannot be
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compared with those of other projects or evaluated for their ethical, as well as
their practical and technical, successes. These comparisons and evaluations are
necessary to ensure that the information professions are dealing equitably
with all cultures and with each of their individual members. In addition,
comparisons and evaluations help ensure that we are careful to identify
initially and to address subsequently the most difficult problems, such as, for
example, the ``preservation of the immense cultural heritage of the numerically
smaller peoples, particularly those without written languages'' (Arsky and
Cherny, 1998, p. 2). The concept of cultural and user hospitality thus appears to
be a candidate for an applicable ethical framework based on UDHR and GIJ,
one that can help ensure the continuation of cultural, and therefore of
information, access and diversity.
Time and calendars
Identification of the theoretical construct of cultural hospitality as a potential
framework for ethically based knowledge representation and organization
systems that rest on the foundation principles of UDHR and GIJ needs, like any
theoretical construct, to be augmented by `èmpirical analysis of local realities''
(Cogburn, 1998, p. 4). This section contains such an empirical analysis that is
designed to make it possible to assess the concept of cultural hospitality for its
potential applicability as an ethical framework for knowledge representation
and organization systems and to review possible implementation methods for
their compliance with the principles of UDHR and GIJ.
The previous discussion of cultural warrant and cultural hospitality
emphasized the multiplicity of cultures and of the individuals within them.
Nevertheless, universal concepts that appear to exist in all cultures can be
identified, and these cultural universals provide opportunities to investigate the
relationship(s) of universal concepts to their implementation in specific
cultures. Goddard and Wierzbicka (1994) identified eight categories of
universal semantic and lexical concepts that exist in a large number of
languages (and therefore of cultures (Hill and Mannheim, 1992)):
1. Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, PEOPLE
2. Mental Predicates: THINK, SAY, KNOW, FEEL, WANT
3. Determiners and Qualifiers: THIS, THE SAME, OTHER, ONE, TWO, MANY, ALL
4. Actions and Events: DO, HAPPEN, TO/IN
5. Meta-Predicates: NO, IF, CAN/COULD, LIKE, BECAUSE, VERY
6. Time and Place: WHEN, WHERE, AFTER, BEFORE, UNDER, ABOVE
7. Taxonomy and Partonomy: KIND OF, HAVE PARTS
8. Evaluators and Descriptors: GOOD, BAD, BIG, SMALL (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 1994,
pp. 52-3, original emphasis).
Some of these concepts have been investigated as potential universals in

bibliographic classification systems (Beghtol, 2001c; 1997). It is appropriate to
use one of these non-culture dependent concepts for an initial empirical

analysis of possible solutions to knowledge representation and organization
ethical problems because a concept that occurs in many, if not all, languages
and cultures will allow us to check the potential usefulness of the idea of
cultural hospitality as a theoretical framework.
Goddard and Wierzbicka (1994) identified basic lexical and semantic
elements of time signifying ``when'', `àfter'', and ``before''. The ubiquity of these
time concepts in human cultures means that the concept of time has a
complicated history, and many aspects of time and time-keeping could be used
to demonstrate the socio-cultural importance of time, time concepts and time
representations. Culture influences, for example, concepts of chronology (Sato,
1991), an individual's sense of duration (Flaherty, 1991), and an individual's
cognitive efficiency (Kelly et al., 1999). A potentially more pervasive analysis
and a potentially deeper understanding of ideas about time in different
cultures, however, is available in the culturally embedded artefact of specific
calendars as a method of time representation and organization.
Calendars are non-universal social constructs that serve a number of
practical and symbolic cultural purposes and that incorporate varied methods
of conceptualizing, structuring and representing time (Garland, 1999; Poole,
1999). The salience of a calendar in a culture and the potential invisibility of its
influence on members of the culture are similar to the importance and
invisibility of other cultural artefacts such as classification systems and other
kinds of knowledge representation and organization systems (Bowker and Star,
1999). Like those systems, too, a calendar serves both syntactic (structural) and
semantic (meaning) functions in the lives of both individuals and cultures.
Among other things, a calendar structures the meaningful events of each
aspect of an individual's daily life, civil, legal and religious occasions, inter- and
intra-cultural relations, and the overall progress of a year and/or of groups of
years. Choice of a particular calendar thus embodies both the preferred cultural
time syntax and the preferred cultural time semantics of a society.
Calendars as artefacts that represent cultural knowledge and preferences
about time for particular purposes provide an opportunity to examine time
concretely as it is perceived in different cultures and as it would need to be
available for the different cultural warrants that ideally can be made available
in culturally hospitable, and therefore presumably ethically based, knowledge
representation and organization systems. Time and calendars thus provide a
convenient point to begin examining the relationship(s) of one cultural
universal to the embedded institutions and practices of specific cultures. In
addition, time appears to be particularly germane in a discussion of the
globalization of information because, as Cackowski (1994, p. 6) noted, we can
trace a line of development in time-keeping devices from the ``concrete, from a
qualitatively defined situation, from the local, towards the abstract, the
quantitative, and the global''. The same kind of evolution is occurring in the
cultural and technological globalization of information. A comparable
relationship between a universal concept and a specific kind of cultural artefact
Proposed
ethical warrant
521
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58,5
522
obtains between the general concept of space and specific maps or diagrams of
spaces. Time, however, is generally considered to be more abstract than space.
For example, Ranganathan considered time to be the most abstract of the five
fundamental categories he hypothesized (Ranganathan, 1965b, pp. 66-7), and
for that reason he placed time last in the citation order of his PMEST facet
formula. As Brey (1999) noted, it is more difficult to detect and remove bias in
abstract domains. It seems therefore best to start with a difficult problem in an
abstract domain on the assumption that, if the complications of a difficult
problem can be analyzed and possibly unravelled, less difficult problems will
probably yield to the same or a similar methodology. Until further
investigations are carried out with other universal concepts, it cannot of course
be known whether generalizable conclusions can be drawn. Nevertheless,
examination of one universal concept (time) embedded in local societal
practices (calendars) serves as a starting point for discussion of the concept of
cultural hospitality as an applicable ethical warrant for knowledge
representation and organization systems.
The depth of cultural meaning and social structure in calendars and the level
of detail that would be needed in a knowledge representation and organization
system that was sensitive to issues of time can be shown by example. First, the
use of different calendars is one indicator of cultural identity and of cultural
difference when different cultures exist in close proximity. Zerubavel (1982)
analyzed calendrical efforts made by the early Roman Catholic Church to
dissociate Easter from Passover by establishing the complex method still in use
to decide when Easter will fall each year. Second, evolutionary internal sociocultural changes can be demonstrated by changes in how specific dates are
referred to. Moran (1981) studied the account books of the cathedral chapter of
Montpelier in the second half of the sixteenth century. Some dates in contracts
entered into by the cathedral chapter were expressed in sacred terms (e.g.
Michaelmas), other dates were expressed in secular terms (e.g. the fifteenth of
the month), and some contracts used both conceptions of the calendar as
expressed in dates (e.g. a first payment on a named saint's feast day and
subsequent payments on the same numerical date of subsequent months).
These different ways of entering dates into contracts can be seen as a ``guide to
the intensity and balance of the struggles of social forces'' (Moran, 1981, p. 18)
in France during this period. Third, according to Malmstrom (1973), the Mayan
people of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica used two calendars, a secular calendar
based on 365 days a year and a sacred ritual calendar based on 260 days a year
that is still used in isolated areas of Mexico and Guatemala. Where this 260-day
calendar originated is in dispute, but Malmstrom (1973) suggested that Copan,
Honduras was founded because its location, which has a latitude of 15 degrees
North, was the only place in the Mayan realm where the 260-day calendar could
be accurately calibrated and that Copan became the astronomical centre of the
Mayan realm for this reason. In this case, the social importance of the ritual
calendar was so great that the Maya established Copan near the most remote
frontiers of their domain, about 320km southeast of their main political and
economic centres in northern Guatemala, in order to ensure calendrical

accuracy.
It follows that reforming the calendar is generally believed to have serious
consequences for a society. Calendar reforms can be imposed by a
revolutionary regime to emphasize its political and religious differences from
previous power structures (Zerubavel, 1977) or by a new non-revolutionary
government for similar reasons (Li and Zhang, 1999). It can take the form of a
``calendar war'' arising from the conflicts of a series of foreign conquerors who
have imported different calendars (Edmonson, 1976, p. 716), or it can be
accompanied by scientific and/or religious and/or social disputes that may
(Chu, 1997) or may not (Freiberg, 2000) end in execution for the losing parties.
Attempts at calendar reform can fail through the determined opposition of
small groups with intense particular interests (Davies et al., 1999), or they can
succeed in spite of the opposition of larger, less well-organized groups (Poole,
1995). From these examples of the gravity with which cultures treat calendar
reform we can infer that calendars are considered to be deeply important
repositories of information about the operation and meaning of a culture for its
members. Changing the calendar, in effect, changes the culture. By extension,
changing a calendar has important practical and symbolic consequences and
implications for the individuals in that society. We may thus conclude that
access to different calendars for different cultures and for individuals who may
participate in the different levels and layers of different cultures at different
times is a potentially important element in creating ethically based global
information systems, including knowledge representation and organization
systems.
Cultural hospitality and calendars
The overall ethical warrant of an information system that has been suggested
is based on two principles from UDHR and GIJ that specify the access,
communication and information rights of individuals and the access,
communication and information rights of communities. The theoretical concept
of cultural hospitality has been suggested as a foundation concept that may
allow us to develop ethically based knowledge representation and organization
systems and also to assess the extent to which these systems have conformed
to UDHR and GIJ principles. Adherence to an ethical warrant articulated
through the concept of cultural hospitality requires that we avoid biased
representation by providing access to information and by encouraging its
dissemination by and for individuals and communities based on any
assumption, point of view, or feature of any culture. To simplify the discussion,
it is convenient to retain the example of the calendar on the understanding that
this example may not cover all other possible social constructs.
Two general methods could be used to accommodate different calendars in
knowledge representation and organization systems: the canonical authority
file approach and the non-canonical individual choice approach. These two
methods can be assessed for the extent of their potential to promote the ethical
Proposed
ethical warrant
523
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principles of community and individual rights to information and its

dissemination. Efforts to establish a new uniform calendar for the entire world
are not considered in this paper because they do not conform to the UDHR and
GIJ goals of respecting and preserving the inherent diversity of individuals
and of cultures (examples at Calendar Reform, available at: http://
personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/calendar-reform.html (visited 17 April 2001)). The
opinion that:
The only way to be fair to all cultures is to not use any one of their great counts [the beginning
date chosen for a particular calendar] as the global great count (Volk, 1995, p. 168),
cannot be justified on the ethical principles supported in this paper because

calendrical (and therefore cultural and information) diversity would not be
retained or supported in compliance with the principles of UDHR and GIJ.
The library and information science community developed canonical
authority files to control the searchable forms of names (e.g. personal,
corporate, work) and the expression of subjects, in, for example, subject
heading lists and thesauri. In an authority file, one name or subject term is
chosen as the preferred name or term and other possible names or terms are
established as references to the preferred one. Currently, response to issues of
the globalization of information have broadened the venue of the authority file
model from library catalogues to a consideration of the present and future
possibilities of globally accessible networked resources. For example, the
original International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
(IFLA) concept of universal bibliographic control (UBC) required, among other
things, that the same form of name be used globally to facilitate record sharing.
Recently, the IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC
Core Programme (UBCIM) Working Group on Minimal Level Authority
Records and ISADN (IFLA, 1998) recognized that world-wide use of the same
form of name is not practical and will not respond to different cultural needs.
To address this problem, Tillett (1995, p. 4) suggested:
. . . a single control record with the ability to code which authoritative form and which
references are to be selected for a given catalog or a given view of a catalog,
in order to serve local linguistic and cultural needs. Bregzis (1982) made a
similar suggestion about names for somewhat different reasons, but at the time
he wrote the suggestion was considered impractical on technical and
theoretical grounds.
For calendars, cultural considerations could guide which authoritative
calendar was established in a given instance and references (possibly in the
form of conversion tables from other calendars (Dershowitz and Reingold,
1997)) could be provided as, for example, an implementation of the document
object identifier (DOI) model (Paskin, 1999). It is worth noting, however, that
calendrical authority files have not been suggested in the library and
information science literature and that discussions that include consideration of
time, dates and dating generally assume the use of a standard western
Gregorian calendar (Zhou and Fikes, 2000; IFLA, 1998; Beard, 1996; Tudhope
et al., 1995). In addition, the authority file model broadened to include different
cultures does not provide adequately for the dimension of individual choice
that is one of the essential components of an ethical warrant based on UDHR
and GIJ. In the broadened authority file model, individuals would have to
accept whatever decisions had been made by a higher authority within their
nation (e.g. the National Bibliographic Agency (NBA) of a particular country as
suggested by IFLA (1998)). A decision made by such an agency may be
inappropriate for an individual's current information needs.
A non-canonical model, as an alternative to the broadened authority file
model, is needed to make it possible for an individual to choose different access
mechanisms at different times and/or for different individual and/or cultural
purposes. For historical research, for example, one might want to use one of the
versions of a Mayan, Julian, Persian or Chinese calendar, but for current needs
one might want to use a standard western Gregorian calendar. Patterson et al.
(2000) suggested that filtering mechanisms be used to provide user-enabled
choice of electronic content within a certain social context for a certain purpose.
Lagoze (1997) suggested that dynamic surrogates derived from an information
object could be developed with an interface that adapted to an individual user's
current needs, either automatically through modeling of that particular user or
through direct personal choice at the time of a search. Similarly, Olson (1996)
pointed out that a universal language of authority control is not necessary for
subject access and that different communities and individuals could use
current electronic capabilities to redefine and/or rename subjects for local
cultural and/or personal needs.
Non-canonical user-centred control mechanisms would mean that, for
example, a user might choose to consider ``Western science as merely another
local knowledge system'' (Trosow, 2001, p. 378) when searching for
information. Technical implementation of this idea has apparently not been
undertaken, but the approach may make it possible to avoid the considerable
intellectual and technical problems of mapping large-scale name and/or subject
structures onto each other (McGuinness et al., 2000; Guarino, 1998) or, to
continue with the calendar example, of mapping a large number of different
calendars onto each other for use in the authority file model. This latter
problem is exemplified in the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (American
Library Association, 1998b, p. 415, footnote 17), which pointed out that the
Gregorian calendar was adopted by some countries in 1582 and by others as
late as 1918 and provided two tables with which to convert the Julian to the
Gregorian calendar for bibliographic cataloguing purposes.
In operation, user-based choices for culturally hospitable knowledge
representation and organization systems would allow a user to choose among
``multiple views'' (Parsons, 1996, p. 135) of the same content. It seems clear that
such different perspectives are:
. . . incompatible only in the sense that one cannot adopt different perspectives at the same
time or mix them indiscriminately (Watson, 1985, p. 40).
Proposed
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525
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Thus, the availability of different perspective-based cultural warrants could

theoretically be made available within a culturally hospitable knowledge
representation and organization system. This practice would allow reasoned
individual choice about which perspective would be culturally appropriate
and personally or professionally useful in different information creating,
information seeking, and/or information sharing tasks. Because, as discussed
above, individuals band together in cultures and communities and perpetuate
those cultures and communities by the choices they make (Moody-Adams
1994), the option of allowing users direct choice among various access
mechanisms confers advantages on both cultures and individuals.
Thus, cultural hospitality implemented in user-based choice mechanisms
appears to be a foundation concept that allows the two germane ethical
principals of UDHR and GIJ to be potentially realized both on an intellectual
and on a technical level. It should noted, however, that the provision of different
calendars privileges the role of calendars as part of the syntactic apparatus of a
culture. It does not specifically or necessarily preserve the meanings of specific
calendrical provisions for a culture that has adopted it. Nevertheless, a person
who wants to use a particular calendar for a particular purpose would
presumably understand the cultural meaning(s) of that calendar. No knowledge
representation and organization system has been able to anticipate all the
possible meanings retrieved information will have for every user.
Conclusion
In the electronic global information environment, information creating,
seeking, dissemination and use are not limited by time, by place, or by static
discourse communities. How can knowledge representation and organization
systems respond to the ethical challenges that arise from these new
circumstances? This paper has responded to that question by proposing the
theoretical concept of cultural hospitality with user-choice mechanisms as a
theoretical foundation for establishing methods of developing culture-neutral
systems and theories. Ideally, the concept of cultural hospitality can create an
intersection between the ethical issues of the globalization of information and
their concrete implementation in knowledge representation and organization
system design, evaluation, maintenance and revision. Despite the complicated
networks of relationships among individuals and their individually chosen
complex of cultures, the concept of cultural hospitality with user choice options
appears to make it theoretically possible for people to think globally, to act
globally, and, at the same time, to think and act locally and individually. Future
research is needed to refine theoretically and to implement concretely the
principles of cultural hospitality, and the extent of the relevance of this concept
to different domains needs to be assessed. In addition, the ideas developed in
this paper need wide debate and research into specific implementation methods
and procedures.
As we have seen, the validity of a system of applied ethics can be grounded
on universal principles, on rights, and/or on duties and obligations (Hannabus,
1998). Equally, the success of a method for applying such an ethical system can
be assessed on those same three values. The concept of cultural hospitality is
based on the universal principles of UDHR and GIJ and is therefore
theoretically grounded in the rights of individuals and of communities. The
duty of securing diversity of cultural and personal information access, then,
falls to information professionals, who have an obligation to design, evaluate,
maintain and revise knowledge representation and organization systems so
that they conform to these ethical principles as closely as possible.
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About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com

A proposed ethical warrant

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Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto,

Keywords Information systems, National cultures, User satisfaction, Ethics

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to resolve than previous questions about organizing physical media for

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It follows, then, that each individual may potentially belong to a number of

It also seems clear that individual members of a culture may legitimately

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communities (Luhrman, 2000). Thus, like societies themselves, individuals may

On narrower scales, similar assumptions and arguments have been made in

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individual identifies with some cultural group, participates in its deliberations,

The same is true of other kinds of knowledge representation and organization

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focused on comparing the local advantages and disadvantages of standard and

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(1) ``respect for the self and others'';

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(5) ``be faithful to organizational public and professional trust''.

As Smith (2001, p. 527) noted:

Community is addressed in Article 27 of the UDHR:

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What specific problems for knowledge representation and organization

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organization systems need to be universally valid and, therefore, non-culture

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accordance with this neutrality (Sargent, 1993). The concept of cultural

Fully hospitable knowledge representation and organization systems for global

Viewed in this way, the concept of cultural hospitality provides a potentially

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Some of these concepts have been investigated as potential universals in

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use one of these non-culture dependent concepts for an initial empirical

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economic centres in northern Guatemala, in order to ensure calendrical

principles of community and individual rights to information and its

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cannot be justified on the ethical principles supported in this paper because

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Thus, the availability of different perspective-based cultural warrants could

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