Posted by: ses in Wisdom
There’s all sorts of wisdom in academia. It seems to have started in business schools, but LIS has taken up the banner too. It’s only a matter of time before we start awarding MSWS degrees.
It’s in handbooks of Measuring System Design. This isn’t on UNC’s subscription, so I couldn’t say what the SI unit of Wisdom is, but I’ll take a guess at the kilowit.
Other brave souls have attempted to identify the definitions of the Wisdom hierarchy (and why it changes to the Information Hierarchy when Information Scientists talks about it, and the Knowledge Hierarchy when Knowledge Management professionals are involved).
See The wisdom hierarchy: representations of the DIKW hierarchy for one effort.
After revisiting Ackoff’s original articulation of the hierarchy, definitions of data, information, knowledge and wisdom as articulated in recent textbooks in information systems and knowledge management are reviewed and assessed, in pursuit of a consensus on definitions and transformation processes
We should have plenty of time afterwards for tea and cake.
The sad thing is, I think there is an operationalisable definition available using Shannon’s Information Theory as a starting point, but the result isn’t that exciting. If you treat Knowledge as the ability to reason backwards from a desired end state from the inferred current state (based on perceived data), then executing that plan, updating current state as more information is learned; then Wisdom can be the ability to infer forwards to the fuller set of consequences of those actions. Since the only real law in this area is the law of unintended consequences, this isn’t too useful a definition.
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“Data organization.” “Human Information Organizing Behavior.” “Knowledge Organization Systems.” What would characterize a “Wisdom Organization System?”
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Self Archiving has failed. Stealth Archiving is the answer.
An ordinary person spends there time getting out avoiding tense situations. A repo-rat spends his time getting in to tense situations.
Never broke into an office. Never wire-tapped an office. Kid. I never broke into a laptop. I shall not corrupt a file northe contents thereof. Nor through inaction let that file or the digital contents thereof come to harm. That’s what I call the repo code kid. Don’t forget it etch it in your brain. Not many people got a code to live by anymore.
(nodding to Wisconsin)
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Posted by: ses in LCSH, SKOS
TThere’s a critical difference between subject based knowledge organization schemes created to organize books and other documents, (e.g. LCC, DDC, and LCSH), which are defined in terms of the things which a work is about, and rigorous, class based ontologies that are based on the properties of the things themselves.
Some relationships may be valid in terms of subjects, but may not apply directly to the things themselves. For example, a car wheels are part of cars, and cars are a type of vehicle. These relationships are always* true, and are examples of two different types of hierarchical relationships - partitive (is-part-of) (BTP) , and generic (is-a-kind-of) (BTG)
Always-aboutness is the combination of all the different types of hierarchical relationship - this is the Broader Term (BT) relationship. In terms of aboutness, we can easily say that everything about car wheels is always about cars, and everything about cars is always about vehicles. We can also directly infer that everything about car wheels must always be about vehicles. In other words, the always-aboutness relationship must be transitive.
Transitivity doesn’t hold when you mix different types of hierarchy - car wheels are not a kind of vehicle, but that has nothing to do with the transitivity of plain unqualified Broader Term.
When thinking about systems for organizing information, it’s absolutely critical to remember the difference between the document, and the thing the document is about.
Or in other words:
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What is cyberinfrastructure? A word. And what is in that word “cyberinfrastructure? Air. A trim reckoning! Who has it? He with grants a’Wednesday. Can he built it? No. Can he use it? No. T’isn’t sensible then? Yea, to the tenured. But will it not work for the working? No. Why? Implementation will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Cyberinfrastructure is a mere scutcheon - and so ends my catechism.
When I coined the term cybrarian back in 1991, all I was trying to do was come up with a cute name for a Usenix birds of a feather session for people working on sites protocols and software for finding and sharing information on the net (We’d need a bigger room now.)
It wasn’t creating a new reality - the word just sounded pretty, and would be easy to filk with.
Cyberinfrastructure is different.
It doesn’t scan well.
Simon
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Posted by: ses in LCSH
This is the latest version of the Doorbell -> Mammal graph; it shows the direct and indirect broader terms of doorbells in LCSH.
This incarnation of the graphic adds one new piece of visual information that seems to be very very suggestive. Dashed lines are used to indicate broader term references that have never been validated since BT and NT references were automatically generated from the old SA (See Also) links in 1988. Click to download the PDF version

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Concepts are made with sets of documents; words with sets of things.
The classes of OWL are the words of Svenonius.
The concepts of SKOS are the terms of Svenonius.
Wm. Blake (Spirit)
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Posted by: ses in LCSH
By a curious coincidence, I just noticed that the earliest surviving entries in the LCSH Subjects files were created on January 27th, 1986. This date would have been the first Monday after the ALA Midwinter conference (Jan 18th-22nd ,1986).
From the time stamps, it seems as if the system became live for new entries on this date. Older entries weren’t added until Feb 11th.
Less than half of these converted entries have had their references evaluated. This is suggestive.
Reference evaluation (008/29)
| Value |
Count |
Percentage |
| a (Evaluated) |
45,495 |
38% |
| b (Not Evaluated) |
46,387 |
39% |
| n (No References) |
27,320 |
23% |
| Total |
119,202 |
100% |
[LCSH 150s, established, as obtained from authorities.loc.gov of December 2006]
Simon
p.s.
The oldest surviving record, for “Grouper fisheries”, was assigned LCCN “sh 86000005″.
You should have seen the ones that got away.
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What is a document? The sad thing is, this still makes sense to me in context.
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The more one reads Ranganathan, the more one appreciates just how far ahead of his time he was.
Now, thanks to the internet, we can begin to make his vision a reality.
Behold - the Ranganathong !

(This is all Kristina’s fault. Mostly.)
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