Power Laws in the Information Production Process


Book Description

Explains numerous informetric regularities based on a decreasing power law as size-frequency function, i.e. Lotka's law. It revives the historical formulation of Alfred Lotka of 1926 and shows the power of this power law, both in classical aspects of informetrics (libraries, bibliographies) and in 'new' applications such as social networks.




Power Laws


Book Description

This monograph is a comprehensive and cohesive exposition of power-law statistics. Following a bottom-up construction from a foundational bedrock – the power Poisson process – this monograph presents a unified study of an assortment of power-law statistics including: Pareto laws, Zipf laws, Weibull and Fréchet laws, power Lorenz curves, Lévy laws, power Newcomb-Benford laws, sub-diffusion and super-diffusion, and 1/f and flicker noises. The bedrock power Poisson process, as well as the assortment of power-law statistics, are investigated via diverse perspectives: structural, stochastic, fractal, dynamical, and socioeconomic. This monograph is poised to serve researchers and practitioners – from various fields of science and engineering – that are engaged in analyses of power-law statistics.




Handbook of Information Science


Book Description

Dealing with information is one of the vital skills in the 21st century. It takes a fair degree of information savvy to create, represent and supply information as well as to search for and retrieve relevant knowledge. How does information (documents, pieces of knowledge) have to be organized in order to be retrievable? What role does metadata play? What are search engines on the Web, or in corporate intranets, and how do they work? How must one deal with natural language processing and tools of knowledge organization, such as thesauri, classification systems, and ontologies? How useful is social tagging? How valuable are intellectually created abstracts and automatically prepared extracts? Which empirical methods allow for user research and which for the evaluation of information systems? This Handbook is a basic work of information science, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of information retrieval and knowledge representation. It addresses readers from all professions and scientific disciplines, but particularly scholars, practitioners and students of Information Science, Library Science, Computer Science, Information Management, and Knowledge Management. This Handbook is a suitable reference work for Public and Academic Libraries.




Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication


Book Description

Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published "The need for a theory of citing" —a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact.




The Organization of Knowledge


Book Description

Through different theoretical and analyses glasses, this book critically examines the organization of knowledge as it is involved in matters of digital communication, the social, cultural, and political consequences of classifying, and how particular historical contexts shape ideas of information and what information to classify and record.




Folksonomies


Book Description

Collaborative information services on Web 2.0 are used by Internet users to produce digital information resources, and to furnish the contents of the resources with their own keywords, so-called tags. This book deals with collaborative information services and folksonomies as a method of representing knowledge and a tool for information retrieval. Collaborative information services on Web 2.0 are used by Internet users not only to produce digital information resources, but also to furnish the contents of the resources with their own keywords, so-called tags. Whilst doing so the user is not required to comply with rules, as is necessary with a library catalogue. The amount of user-generated tags in a collaborative information service is referred to as folksonomy. Folksonomies allow users to relocate their own resources and to search for other resources. This book deals with collaborative information services and folksonomies both as a method of representing knowledge and a tool for information retrieval.




Knowledge Representation in the Social Semantic Web


Book Description

The main purpose of this book is to sum up the vital and highly topical research issue of knowledge representation on the Web and to discuss novel solutions by combining benefits of folksonomies and Web 2.0 approaches with ontologies and semantic technologies. The book contains an overview of knowledge representation approaches in past, present and future, introduction to ontologies, Web indexing and in first case the novel approaches of developing ontologies.




New Directions in Information Behaviour


Book Description

New Research in Information Behaviour provides an understanding of the new directions, leading edge theories and models in information behaviour. Information behaviour is conceptualized as complex human information related processes that are embedded within an individual's everyday social and life processes.




Scientific Metrics: Towards Analytical and Quantitative Sciences


Book Description

This book presents scientific metrics and its applications for approaching scientific findings in the field of Physics, Economics and Scientometrics. Based on a collection of the author’s publications in these fields, the book reveals the profound links between the measures and the findings in the natural laws, from micro-particles to macro-cosmos, in the economic rules of human society, and in the core knowledge among mass information. With this book the readers can gain insights or ideas on addressing the questions of how to measure the physical world, economics process and human knowledge, from the perspective of scientific metrics. The book is also useful to scientists, particularly to specialists in physics, economics and scientometrics, for promoting and stimulating their creative ideas based on scientific metrics.




Turning Points


Book Description

"Turning Points: The Nature of Creativity" discusses theories and methods focusing on a critical concept of intellectual turning points in the context of critical thinking, scientific discovery, and problem solving in general. This book introduces a novel analytical and experimental system that provides not only new ways for retrospective studies of scientific change but also for characterizing transformative potentials of prospective scientific contributions. The book is intended for scientists and researchers in the fields of information science and computer science. Dr. Chaomei Chen is an Associate Professor at the College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, USA.