Challenges and Emerging Practices for

Knowledge Organization in the

Electronic Information Environment.
Prof I V Malhan
Dean, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences & Director ASC
University of Jammu, Jammu (Tawi).
Email: imalhan_47@rediffmail.com

and

S. Amrik Singh
Head, Department of Computer Science
MBSCET, Jammu (Tawi).
Email: amriksingh07@gmail.com 1
There is huge volume of information available on
the Internet

Yahoo alone claims to have indexed 20 billion

documents.
Search Engine Exalead indexed about 7 billion
documents.
There are one million videos on U- tube
About 7 lack electronic books and niche titles are
published every year.
Web is growing at the @300 percent every year.

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Internet usage statistics (June 30.2010)

With the sprawling Internet and growing volume of

web content, its usage is also increasing.
In the North America, the percentage of the Internet
penetration in population is 77.4%,whereas users are
13.5% of population.
In the European region, percentage of its penetration
in population is 58.4 percent, whereas users are 24.2%
of population.
In the Asian region, percentage of its penetration in
population is just 21.5%, whereas percentage of users
are 42.0 percent.
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In view of huge volume of electronic
information, the challenge is
How to evaluate and quality filter the information?

How to index and bibliographically control this information?

How to timely access the worthwhile information?

How to compactly store and quickly retrieve the worthwhile

information?

How to bring the useful information to the notice of users

and put it to productive use?

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Incessant flow of information and Individual user
Increasing number of documents are being digitized and
made accessible on the internet.
Enormous volume of information is available, whereas an
individual information user has a limited time and
capacity to make use of such information resources.
The challenge for individual user is to make choices of
documents to use in a given time constraint.
The challenge for the information technologists is to
provide fastest access to precise information.
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Challenges for the Information professionals are
 To evaluate and analyze information for quality and reliability.

 To proactively link information resources with the users information requirements.

 To innovatively design and develop services that offer more value and convenience

to information users.

 To promptly link information with information to create knowledge mashups for

problem solving.

 To develop state of the art knowledge management tools for just in time retrieval of

desired information.

 To present information in a way that may make the process of information use

interesting, amusing and engaging.

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This requires categorization and organization of
worthwhile hypermedia according to some order
or schema.
 Hypermedia offers an exciting new method of linking and searching information.

 It promptly facilitates spatial search of collateral sources of information cited or

linked with a document.

 Any further effort for hypermedia documents’ organization has to be pursued

keeping in view and keeping intact this intrinsic feature of hypermedia.

 As the Internet is now increasingly concentrating on personal space, any

hypermedia organization schema should also offer an information prescription to

an end user’s information problem.
 It must meet the ultimate objective of customized and personalized

dissemination of information.

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 Hypermedia and Different subject areas
 In certain subject areas hypermedia documents can offer a way to create information

chains for better understanding of past developments for facilitating future course of

action. For instance.

 In the subject area of law, latest case decisions can be hyperlinked with previous

judgments of other courts and relevant legislations.

 In the subject field of history, latest development and contemporary situations can be

hyperlinked with the past happenings that may themselves be organized in the

chronological order.

 In chemistry, documents reporting new compounds can be hyperlinked with the related

past research to provide comprehensive information for better understanding of

development of new compounds.

 Patent documents in a specific area may be linked to trace the course of inventions and

study technology history.

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Fluid information environment

 The present fluid information environment offers, a fertile field for

knowledge organization and information architecture research.

 Focus is desired to develop knowledge organization tools and practices

that may facilitate instant packaging and repackaging of information

content giving due credit to authorship and respect to copyright laws.

 Efforts are also desired for standardization of such tools and practices

at the international level in the interest of information processing

global information communication.

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Next Generation of Hypermedia organization
technologies
 The next generation of hypermedia organization technologies and

tools may
 Go for application of artificial intelligence methods involving

decomposition and coordination of information content for multi-

tasking, complex multi-objective systems and supporting mission
oriented work.
 They may also integrate the functionality of even eliminating content

to a defunct warehouse after meeting the fixed shelf life or

replacement with more appropriate hypermedia documents.

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Information professionals approach
 Informational professionals have tried organization of web documents using

their standard classification schemes.

An advantage of using classification schemes is that they are already practices

for organizing print documents and their applications have potential to improve
access to web-documents.
 Hypermedia organization with the help of standard classification systems helps

to improve precision in retrieval and considerably reduces the probability of

getting irrelevant web documents in any search process.
 Such an arrangement of web documents also provides users, an overview of

organized information and thus leads to search of additional information that

users desperately need but are not aware of .

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Some examples where classification schemes are
used for organizing hypermedia documents are:
 BUBL LINK uses Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC).

 OCLC’s Net First database has been using an adapted version of DDC.

 Canadian information by subject at the National Library of Canada, Net

sites by numbers at the Tempe Public Library, Arizona also use DDC.
 Social Science Information Gateways (SOSIG) and GERHARD- The
German Academic Web Index used Universal Decimal Scheme (UDC) for
organization of web documents.
 Engineering Information, Inc’s subject scheme is used for organization of
EELS documents.
 Link Larder is a quality filtered information source that uses Swedish
Scheme namely SAB.

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Use of Controlled Vocabularies for Hypermedia

organization
Controlled vocabularies such as standard subject heading lists

and thesauri are also used for organization of hypermedia.

Scotland culture Service (www.scotlandculture.org) have
information resources that are indexed using Library of
Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
Artifact (www.artifact.ac.uk) employs the Art and Architecture

Thesaurus (AAT).
Efforts are also being focused on metadata or descriptive

information about records that require to be achieved and

retrieved e.g. Dublin core metadata standards. 13
Information Technology Professionals Approach

 Information technologists mainly focus on data-mining and data

warehousing technologies for facilitating work specific and problem

focused information resource acquisition and organization.

 A variety of knowledge management tools and web based products are

also emerging that involve hypermedia organization e.g.

Webgrabbers, Moreover (Aggregator of blogs), Cockraine Library,

MD-Scholar, Link RRS, Publi.sh., etc.

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Users’ participation in Hypermedia Organization
Collaborative tagging has emerged as another approach
for organization and retrieval of hypermedia information
resources.
Users themselves assign keywords to information
resources and these system tags can also be looked at and
searched by other users.
However, keywords assigned to information are sources
are not from controlled vocabulary of any information
retrieval system and depends on users, approach and
perspective of looking at the content.
Some of the tagging tools are citeulike, Del.icio.us, Flicker,
Connote, Bibsonomy.

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Need for Synergy of Efforts of Information
Technologists and Information Professionals.
 Efforts are being made by both computer professionals and information professionals to

organize hypermedia with the help of their own expertise and perspectives.
 There is considerable scope for experts from both the fields to work together and co-

design tools for hypermedia organization and searching.

 However, most of ongoing work in this area is parallel rather than understanding

techniques and work domains of each other and collectively work together to develop
most appropriate and user friendly methods of hypermedia organization.
 Collaborative efforts and synergy in the work of information technologists and LIS

professionals may offer more pragmatic solutions for organization of increasingly

unbundled hypermedia documents.

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