Along with a useful biographical sketch, this paper touches on several aspects of R.’s work and philosophy proving to be invaluable to my general line of inquiry.
”[R.] was of the considered opinion that the practice of a discipline, as a rule, precedes its theory. Science is mostly empirical in that phenomena provide the inductive ground from which logical conclusions flower.”
I arrive at my MLIS degree in midlife, with the mixed blessing of a meandering path winding through music, art, mental illness, and several years’ experience in polar opposite library environments: The deeply practical milleiu of a large academic institution, and the cozy, freewheeling splendor of the Prelinger Library. Most of SJSU’s coursework comports with the former; But the later’s ethos of sociability and experimentaiton easily illuminate the limitations of formal “scientific” library frameworks.
R. entered the library world
At the very moment that our budding discipline was designated as a science, [and] sceptics raised doubts about whether it indeed deserved such a status. The term was even ridiculed. But the handling and the treatment of the subject by Ranganathan has vindicated, beyond any shadow of doubt, the conception and stand of the Chicago School in 1930s, which held that librarianship can be treated as in a scientific way.
(“Designated” by whom? Why is this sentence in passive voice? Who decides what’s a science? ISO? NISO? Is there a classification scheme for sciences? If so, who designed it, and who’s in charge of revisions? Would library work be less meaningful if it was an art instead of a science? Is robust classification simply a neccesary outgrowth of the amount of material published? Historians generally dislike counterfactuals, but would libraries not have arrived at some alternative strategy? And would it be neccesary this strategy was scientific in nature?)
Prior to his development of the Five Laws, R. inhaled the literature of the day, and finding them “inadequate in their approach;”
His discontent led him to resolve that, when he had returned to India, he would replace the theoretically weak and foundationless structure of library practice with one that was systematic and based on sound principles.
The “unorganised state of the Madras University Lirbary” provided an ideal sandbox for experimentation with his ideas in a practical setting; The Five Laws thus arises from both theorhetical and practical work. The ideas underlying the book were first presented at a series of “vacation lectures in December 1928” at Madras University.
R. embraced the concept of Ekavakyata, a “principle of integrative interpretation and interconnectedness”:
The basic premise of Ekavakyata is the unity of all knowledge. The systems approach is a weaker form of this principle; mysticism and intuition are its main instruments. Its core tenets are that all entities in this universe are interconnected with one another and that, therefore, one should not view individual entities in isolation.
R. believe that knowledge arose both from “intellection” (empiracal reasoning), and intuition – the later being “a form of knowing that is entirely independent of sensory perception and ratiocinative deduction, and so allows the person possessing it to experience entities in the world in a way that ‘transcends the space-time matrix’”
Satija & Gupta relate R.’s annecdote of visiting a department store in London, where he encounters a Meccano Set [ed: Branded as ‘Erector Set’ in the US]. Observering its modular design, he had an intuitive flash that “just as the Meccano Set allows for the combination and recombination of different elements to form new wholes, so new subjects could be formed by disentangling, combining, and recombining these granules of knowledge.” Colon Classification’s pure faceted structure represents the intellectual extrapolation of this intuitive experience.
R. view[ed] his professional discoveries as spiritual experiences rooted in mysticism and intuition. As he puts it: “[Mysticism] falls within a large debatable territory between sciences and philosophy, between theory and practice, which has been very little explored and is still terra incognita to all intents and purposes. Its difficulties are immense; from that wide and wild No Man’s Land between Sciences and Humanities […] Time may come when mysticism and spiritual experience may be the very keystone of the arch, and serve to complete the full growing circle of organised human knowledge. It will then synthesise all sciences and humanities and become the basis of a truer spiritual outlook than we can possibly have in the ignorance and confusion of our present state of knowledge.” (Note: This quote comes from the Colon Classification forward to the Mysticism main field. )
Any serious discussion of R.’s intellectual ideas should – MUST! – be viewed in this integrative light: That is, Ranganathan’s Library Science is not the root node of a nested structure, but rather exists in a FACETED, NON-HEIRARCHICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH MYSTICISM.
Current digital library systems are overwhelmingly designed for intellection alone. How might we design a digital system for intuition instead? How might we incorporate more intuitive options into existing interfaces?
This paper seeks to add definition to the entangled religious, philosophical, and cultural strands of Hinduism, as experienced and expressed by Ranganathan. Once again, a Western audiences are reminded we’re operating in a fairly different arena here:
Smart suggests that in modern Hinduism there is no necessary conflict between science and religion, since it has fashioned for itself a new philosophy based on old sources in which religion and science are seen as differing responses to the same cosmos, which to the eye of the mystic and the devotee is divine – and to the eye of the scientist is a material order to be controlled and understood. This is a compelling idea, despite the boundaries for Smart being drawn other than for Ranganathan, but it can hardly have been current in the 1930s when Ranganathan was formulating most of his ideas. For him, the division between the intellectual and the intuitive, between reason and faith is absolute. The separation is not between science and religion per se, but between the infinite experienced externally, and the internal experience of the same. How these two can be reconciled is central to the path he eventually took.
A fair warning as Broughton traverses the terrain: “The literature is full of conflicting statements about Ranganathan’s religious beliefs.” We learn that growing up, R.’s family practiced “bhakti, an intense devotional form of Hinduism;” And “a politically oriented movement ‘which stressed the equality of devotees’ and which doubtless laid the foundations for much of Ranganathan’s social agenda in his librarianship.” His wearing of a “‘Gobi’ crescent” tilaka (mark on the forehead) “identifie[d] him as a Saiva, a follower of Shiva.” Hi son states R.’s religious observances occured mostly in private, for example the daily puja, and family rituals; And that “much later in life he [explained to me that] he did all this more to conform to social practice rather than out of any deep inner conviction.”
While in England, he maintained traditional Indian dress, grooming, social customs, and religious observances. Broughton notes his religious observation would have been comprable to his European counterparts, who “would have been actively involved in the Church, and familiar with the Bible and the Christian liturgy.”
Because of his analytical nature, R.’s interest in astrology (Jyotisa) came as somewhat of a surprise to his Western counterparts – but the position of Astrology within the Hinduism’s classical educational framework (the Vendangas) renders it a fairly divergent practice from its Western counterpart. R.’s first scholastic discipline, Mathematics, “in some contexts is considered a subdscipline of jyotisa.”
His love of the Ramamyan is well-evidenced both by quotes in his books, and by the regular exegesic talks he gave before “Library Research Circle meetings at Delhi University.” Several sources report R. regularly held seances around 1934, using a Ouigi board to contact the mathematician Ramanujan about whom R. was currently writing a monograph. R.’s son “Yogeshwar says that the group of friends and colleagues who joined his father in ‘these spiritualistic or mystic escapades’ were all reputable scientists, and for “all of them, there was no link between religion and mysticism.”
“While it is agreed that Ranganathan’s religious beliefs are not apparent from his writings, his use of Indian philosophical methods is more evident.” Broughton again provides some helpful compare-and-contrast with Western systems; Citing, in a broad sense, a sort of transcendence or “liberation from the world of time, change, and rebirth” as the end-goal of these philosophical pursuits.
In R.’s intellectual work, Comentators have identified strains of the Barhmin-associated “Mimamsa (or Purva Mimamsa) school of philosophy;” which is often concerned with “describing rules of ritual and explainations… concerning its meaning and purpose.” R.’s classification system has been liked to “Vaisesika school’s system of categories” in classical Hindu philosophy.
R.’s unusually aescetic lifestyle (including simple meals, “homespun” garments, and a humble living space without servants) “has led many Indian commentators to regard him as a mystic, although that was not the case and he himself repudiated it.” R.’s adherance to this presentation waxed and wanted: R.’s son states that his traditional dress was inspired by Ghandi’s nationalist movement in the 1930s (of which traditional dress and local hand-made garments were a staple), and prior to this his dress was Westernized. Later in life, photographs show him with “a Western hairstyle, and no evidence of such cultural symbols as the caste mark, tuft, or turban.”
Rather, referencing bhakti principles, several of R.’s contemporaries described him as a “Karma Yogi”; That is, one who works toward “liberation” by “yoking” himself to acts or works – in R.’s case, his single-minded focus on Library science. However, his reasoning for pursuing libraries specifically springs from a deeply humanistic standpoint:
It should also not be forgotten that Ranganathan was prominent as a public intellectual figure in Indian society. He was invited to come to Banaras University by Radhakrishnan, the eminent philosopher and sometime President of India, and he played a role in the political, social, and educational development of the country. Foskett speaks of how his appointment as a National Research Professor by the Indian Government “acknowledged the contribution that he had made not only to librarianship, but to the life of the nation.” His son says that his “own works were divided roughly half and half between pure Library Science professionalism and his involvement in education in general. To him the main goal was ‘education for everybody’”. Compared with his theoretical work, for “Indian readers his ceaseless campaign for a nation-wide grid of libraries, ‘to spread enlightenment across the length and breadth of the state’ [was] of much greater practical importance.” Roe points out that: Western interest in Ranganathan has not tended to recognize the importance of the epic political struggles that were taking place in India during his lifetime and that had a profound influence on his library work”. [And that] “identification with the Indian independence movement was central to his library theory. Ranganathan’s pioneering work of the 1930s challenged the ideological structures of colonial rule, advocating libraries and librarians as agents of a national political awakening, especially amongst the rural poor.”
Broughton discusses the placement of Religion and Mysticism within R.’s Colon Classification [hereacter, CC], both of which are in the “main class” sequence.
Earlier editions of R.’s CC describe the selection of main classes as somewhat abritrary (they’re somwhat algined with Madras University’s departments); though later editions find intellectual grounding for his intuitive choices:
In most discussions of the main class order of CC the ‘map of knowledge’ is depicted as a triangle, or occasionally as a broad, upward pointing arrow. Class Δ Mysticism, is the tip, or peak, occupying centre position in the classification. The natural and applied sciences, A-M, precede it, and the humanities and social sciences, N-Z, follow, which division Ranganathan explains as progressing from the natural to the artificial
Later academics who’ve created analytical frameworks for CC describe “Mysticism, or Spiritual Experience, as the ‘peak’ among the main classes, making it central to the universe of knowledge overall, and superior to Religion per se.” Religion arrives in Class Q, and somehwat unusually is grouped closer to Social Sciences than Philosophy. (Most “universal” classification schemes place Religion at the beginning or end.)
Broughton characterizes R.’s Religion classification as significantly less biased than contemporaneous systems, which typically titled this subject “Theology” (and revised to “Religion” around the 1960s). R. divides “Religion” into two facets: Personality and Energy, covering “individual religions and faiths and their subdivisions” and everything else, respectively. The Personality facet contains no further higher-level subdivisions, but places each religion on a flat heirarchy with a chronological ordering.
Mysticism is a Main Class in CC; sitting in the exact center, between classes for (intellectual) hard science and the (intuitive) casses for social science, arts and letter, etc. R.’s disproportionately longer statements regarding this class in CC’s Sixth Edition (1960) include some interesting definitions
The terms ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ refer to the plane of intellection; whereas mystical, occult, and spritual experiences do not beling to the sphere of intellectual apprehension at all. They are said to involve direct (trans-intellectual) insight. (Ranganathan, 1960, 1.92)
This arises from the Hindu philosophical concepts of “Kartirtantra (experimental, analytical study of things in their phenomenal modes); and Vastutantra (global, holistic stufy of thing-in-itself).”
A library theory to be thoroughly classified in Δ
Δ86 is a “device facet”: Should be amplified by [SD] to represent mystical or occult expositions of subject except Fine Arts, Literature and Religion.
Interesting note: The Western influences on Ranganathan are considerable. Brought up in India under British colonial rule, the language of his higher education was English and many of his teachers British. His first professional education was in England in 1924. Coblans comments that “he was very “English” in outlook in many ways. In fact, one could almost say he was an “Imperial” product.”
It is important to stress that the inspiration of the Ramayana and other Hindu scriptures led Ranganathan to develop a holistic worldview that informed both his professional and his personal life, and that won the admiration of not only his Indian colleagues but also of many of his colleagues in the West.
Here we find a lengthy discussion of the Ramayana in R.’s life and work. The ancient Sanskrit epic appears frequently in R.’s writings and lecutres, and informs, at an underlying level, the ideological grounding of his knowledge classification and The Five Laws. R.’s copy of the Ramayana of Valmiki was gifted to him from his headmaster P. A. Subramania Ayyar in 1923; He read a chapter every morning, and marked the beginning date of each full re-read in the book’s opening pages.
One interesting quote from Kumar Girja’s (1992) Ranganathan: An Intellectual Biography posits that R.’s daily Ramamyana readings provided a much-needed break from his unrelenting work schedule, and that its frequent appearance in his work was perhaps from R.’s deep, repeated immersion in the book-as-literature rather than from a primarily religious standpoint. Girja posits the book held, for R., a kind of utopian ideal in its alegories and literary representation of animals, humans, gods, and inclusivity of rational and spiritual matters.
What does it mean that so much of R.’s work is tied into a work of literature?
R. argues in his ontology that some books souls are so powerful they persist time and time again; We are accustomed in Academia to giving deference to ancient epics (e.g. the Odysee was required reading when I was in highschool), but what if this preference grows simply out of scarcity? Developed when literacy rates were vanishingly small, individuals simply had fewer things to reference.
What if instead we looked to our own “personal cannons”? Is part of the power of an epic its monocultural familiarity? E.g., Everyone has to read the Odysee in high school, but you may not have heard Archispire’s __ , Spectral Wound’s __ , or read Black Wings Has My Angel. Without familiariaty, the onus is placed on the reader to “catch up” with the author. Hyperlinks are helpful but deeply distracting from a reading perspective. Perhaps the Power of 33 1/3 or BFI/AFI books is that we can assume a baseline of context for the material being discussed?
Beginning around 1948 and culminating with his 1952 publication of three inter-related volumes,
In the cycle of samsara, the Gross Body’s breakdown ends one physical lifetime, while the Soul and Subtle Body are reincarnated. Because its concerned with the mind and voluntary actions, the Subtle Body carries an individual’s karma, and is responsible for its acrual and discharge between physical lifetimes.
Most often, Ranganathan presents a three-part ontology of the book, but occasionally condenses this down to two. The three-part ontology is presented as follows:
In the two-part ontology, the close relationship between the Soul and Subtle Body becomes a conjoining; mirroring the relationship to a jīva’s bodies during samsara:
In the way that the Soul and Subtle Body can cycle through a procession of gross bodies, a “work” can be transmitted into various “documents” (e.g., editions) and still retain its essential individuality. This coupling of a book’s ideas and their expression emphesizes that, if one wants to write a book, expressing ideas through writing is the only way to do so. (To put this more generally: Communicating ideas is the only way to communicate them. Even conceptual art is typically “set down” in some capacity (e.g. Nam June Paik’s fluxus scores), Even short-duration ephemeral works must be brought into existance.) Many writers would probably argue the writing process itself is integral to the formation and refinement of a book’s “thought-content.” R. “underscores the unity between thought and its linguistic or pictorial expression by stating that ‘the expression and thought are inseparable,’ citing the opening lines of the Kalidasa’s epic poem Raghuvamsa.”
Modern digital formats add an interesting wrinkle to this. On the one hand, there are meaningful distinction between a “work” as expressed in plain text, a pdf file, or in HTML; And these distinctions seem to place digital formats within the Gross Body / Document position in the ontology.
Dousa dismissively describes the Gross Body as a mere platform for the Soul and Subtle Body:
Of the three concepts, that of the gross body, or sthūla-śarīra, requires no comment, for, in both models, it serves simply as the physical substrate of the entity in question: just as the gross body is the physical body of a living being like a man, horse, or mosquito, so is the gross body of a book simply the physical object containing text and illustrations.
R. likewise suggests seeking out healthy, strong, atractive bodies: Heavyweight bindings and study pages that can withstand frequent circulation, and fascinating covers that insprire “bibliophilia.”
I take issue with these diminishings of the Gross Body – but this needs to be prefaced that my issues seem to extend beyond the internal logic of the central Hindu metaphore. My life experience leads me to believe the mind begins in the body.
I happen to inhabit a Gross Body with a few distinctive features which effect my “firstperson (‘I’) relationship to the world.” Before I was properly diagnosed and began my antidepressants; Before I was properly diagnosed and began cognative behavioral practices to address the downstream effects of my autistic brain; And before I began an athletic praxis which positively amplifies both of these, my subjective experience of the world was radically different and (frankly) wrong. Without these intentional corporeal practices, the operation of my subtle body was deeply flawed.
This work concerns the role of Documentaiton, which European authors, beginning in the late 1930s argued was “an emerging and autonomous field,” while R. argued instead for housing Documentation within Library Science. (In the American context, Documentation did not split into its own field, comporting with R.’s prespective.)
What exactly do these authors mean by Documentation? These arguments arise from the dovetailed midcentury proliferation of research and declining cost of publication; i.e., The sheer amount of material coming into existance suggested the need for an intermediary (triage) step to ensure this material was adequitely discoverable and findable. Both in the European and Indian perspectives, Documentation is seen as an outgrowth of “bibliographic activity.” The practical work of Documentation encompases creating records, digests, transcriptions, indexes, lit reviews, etc. The material to be documented differs depending on the author, but centers mainly around “scientific and industrial spheres” and related commercial and administrative concerns.
Paul Otlet’s 1934 publication of Traité de Documentation “systematised a practice that had been applied and refined for at least four decades in the European context;” For example, with a bibliographic card catalog called the Universal Bibliographic Repertory [RBU], which “served as a tool to update specialists about the most recent developments in their research areas.” At the time, the most notable organization in this space was the International Institute of Bibliography, founded 1895 in Brussels, renamed the International Federation for Documentation in 1938.
Otlet’s Traité focused on systems and standards for collecting what we’d now call metadata on a “document;” media-agnostic and “defined by its documentary ‘function’ rather than its ‘form’.” Extendying beyond mere bibliography, Otlet’s Documentation also encompases syntheses, neccesitating the definition and standardization of a new set of techniques. The endgame woul be international Docuemntalist associations contributing to the RBU’s expansion into a “‘universal book’ that would enable a centre for processing and accessing information.”
Bradford, a contemporary, had similar end-goals for Documentation, but saw the practice as more of a technical one, without requiring the establishment of a new branch of science. He also saw the primary users of Documentation products as field specialists rather than a universal audience. Both authors argued documentation distinguished itself from Library Science in:
Suzanne Briet took a more specific view of what exactly constituted a “document,” that is, what rendered something suitable for “documentation.” She characterized the purpose of a document as its generation of secondary, tertiary (etc) documents – that is, an object (a star) only gains access to the Documentation process when it is documented (a photo of the star). This concept differs somewhat from Otlet and bradford’s ideal endgame of a universal knowledge record, but results in a similar set of technical concerns and practices.
R. on the other hand “approached Documentation not necessarily as a discipline but rather as a library practice;” characterizing it as “cataloguing work carried out with greater intensity (specialization).” He dividing the practice into two activities: documentation work (a specialized subset of catalogging) and documentation service (a specialized subset of reference service).
While European authors characterized Documentation as a multinational “space for political and scientific discourses,” The differing political context of India’s library system once again surfaces as relevant to keeping Documentation an internal practice:
For [R.], library professionals, aware of their social role and function in the democratic process, not only as distributors of abstract knowledge conveyed in books but also agents embedded within an educational democracy, were professionals capable of performing the activities required by the emerging documentary universe.
On the European side… there was a political and discursive strategy for the establishment of a theoretical-practical discipline that would occupy a new epistemological space, focused on social progress based on the provision of documentary records. Ranganathan’s strategy, on the other hand, was to consolidate the epistemological space of Library Science, considering that the democratic and social process related to documentary work could and should be carried out by librarians who were aware of their role in society.
Reductively, the European system was responding to a cultural space of theohertical multinational neutrality; while the Indian system was responding to a cultural space newly-won democratic independence.
Lastly, I’d like to reproduce the following spicy Ranganthan quote:
Ranganathan often critiqued the coining of names of new professionals (documentalists) and a new field (Documentation), stating that the European tradition was merely inventing new names for things that already existed. About this point he wrote: “The documentalists claim that they are doing a piece of work totally different from that of librarians. They do not at all want to call themselves as librarians. They do not want to include their subject in the term ‘Library Science’. They even invent new names for their ‘New Subject’ such as ‘Information Science’ and ‘Informatics’. They call themselves ‘Information Scientists’ in preference to ‘Library Scientists’. This creates a self-deception in them. They imagine that changing the label on a bottle necessarily means change in its contents.”
This is a quantitative bibliometric analysis, collecting “all works citing Ranganathan in the Web of Science Core Colltion,” and narrowing the results to Five Laws references only, resulting in “306 citing documents.” Several rounds of disambiguation and processing resulted in “81 keywords,” and six document types (Article, Proceedings Paper, book Chapter, Book, Review, and Others).
Publications citing The Five Laws dated from 1957 to the present, with “an increasing trend from 2005 onward,” accounting for 77.5% of total citations. (This comports with my FLFX research, most of which is found in the early web era and beyond. I’d also the citations/year graph they produced resembles the total number of publications per year – e.g. we might be looking at an xkcd heatmap.)
English-lanuage publicaitons were the overwhelming majority (272), with Portuguese being the next highest (21). Martínez-Ávila, et al. trace this line of scholarship to Hagar Espanha Gomes, who from the 1970s onward produced “studies of and about Ranganathan’s classification theory from the Graduate Program in Information Science at the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT), the pioneer graduate course in the ‘Library and Information Science’ in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Articles (206) were the most frequent, with Proceedings (26) and Others (24; including Editorial Material, Book Review, Note, and Letter) being the next highest. Martínez-Ávila et al. note:
The age of the work has not prevented it from being cited by recent journal articles, in which discussions about new trends and philosophical foundations for LIS are published, and this confirms that the book is a strong basis for work in the area and that is a sign of its relevance and connection to the current scientific discourse.
And I want to push back on this a little. The qualitative work on the FLFX corpus identifies a worrying trend in The Five Laws-citing work toward a blatant reduction of its contents; including in some cases what I’d consider misreadings based on extrapolation from the wording of the laws rather than their explainations. Per my previous work on uncitedness, this once again reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis: We know when a work is being cited, but not why or the nature of the author’s engagement with the cited work. I believe personally that R.’s Five Laws remains a deeply relevant work, but I’m concerned that its “connection to the current scientific discourse” requires an asterisk.
The keyword network analaysis reveals clusters around: academic library, library, univeristy library, digital library, etc. Some interesting things I’d like to call out:
The author “co-occurrence network presents a low number of ties, which points to the diversity of topics addressed by the documents that cite The Five Laws of Library Science. However, the network and the different keywords that compose it mostly relate to the universe of librarianship, as 84% of the documents fall under the Information Science & Library Science WoS category.” The network reveals a high co-citation rate with Louis Guttman and Brian Vickerey, both influential in the development of facet analysis. Other notable clusters include authors:
The graph includes one small cluster of co-authors representing a “thematically distant” body of work from the others:
J. Daniel Elam writes about anticolonialism (and the fact that the Five Laws were developed during colonial India is mentioned by George), while Kama Maclean and Ajay Skaria write about the history of India (both are cited by Elam). The point is that Ranganathan is cited as a historical figure in a book in which several authors are co-cited without being in direct relationship to Ranganathan’s discourse, only because they give a description and reference to The Five Laws.
This paper begins with a nicely succinct summary of The Five Laws of Library Science’s impact on the library world as a whole. “Although Ranganathan is often revered for his work on facet theory and the Colon Classification in knowledge organisation circles, The Five Laws of Library Science seems to have made a greater impact overall, as it is the most cited work by Ranganathan according to the Google Scholar”
the Five Laws are a mirror of Ranganathan’s practicality and an easy way of expressing fundamental ideas for the horizon of library work. There is a clear influence of the Indian tradition of universal postulates too. Ranganathan assumed that this work was born under the influence of the Laws of Manu, pedagogical texts that codify the Hindu philosophy of life and the organisation of society.
The expression “Library Science” in the title also stands out. It can also be interpreted as a statement of the scientific status of library work, an aspect that was also emerging and being established at the time (note that in 1928 the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago was established). In fact, it was the work of authors such as Dewey, Cutter, and of course Ranganathan during those and previous years that cemented the scientific status of the area7. According to Loan8, although the library profession is as old as human knowledge, library professionals worked without organised guidance until Ranganathan’s laws became the pivot and bedrock for the progress and development of librarianship worldwide. These laws guided librarians in a moment in which librarianship needed scientific principles to become a Library Science. Satija9 points out that Ranganathan “also got the subject and substance of library science recognized among the academia, intelligentsia and the government,” and that institutionalisation is essential for any scientific domain.
a space of dilly-dallying
Knowledge Organization [KO] and Knowlege Representation [KR] are two different strategies for making the unweildy heap of human knowledge legible. KO is mainly used in library science, while KR is mainly used in ML and AI.
KO is divided into Systems and Approaches:
KR is divided into Artefacts and Metholodigies:
Though their “high-level functionality” is comprable (e.g. Both KO and KR aim to provide a navigable map of knowledge), their differing aproaches lead to significantly different output. KO is intentional and its output arises from a cultural lineage; KR’s output is emergent, and describes knowledge based on the particulars of its tooling.
Giunchiglia, et al. observe KO and KR’s respective strengths and weaknesses are quite compatable: That is, KO’s systems are typically lack technical emphesis, while KR’s methodologies typically lack considerations of the cultural context (e.g. “cannons”) in which knowledge production occurs. This paper examines (1) the high-level correspondence betwen KO and KR outputs, and (2) the feasibility of combining the two appraoches.
The authors uses R.’s facet analaysis as the go-between, because it’s structuring makes it “naturally amenable to algorithmisation;” And it arrives with a robust body of instruction and commentary (e.g. “cannons”) about how it should be employed. They consider how such a system might be integrated with the existing digital library infrastructure of the University of Trento, Italy.
In comparing a KO and KR representation of the same entity (a 1973 book on tropical diseases), the authors identify an interesting tendency in KR: Creating supra-metadata heirarchies of metadata type. To whit, a “book” becomes a subclass of a “mind product”; Authors and editors are subclasses of “people”; And the publisher is a subclass of “organization”. In a broad sense, the authors want to determine if there are comprable strategies involved in the generation of these “artefacts;” and if so, can be they be condensed into a single strategy which produces all arefacts of both representations?
In discussing recent KO studies, the authors note (interestingly!) “that researchers working on KR methodologies have not attempted to chart out any form of mapping from KR to KO;” though at least one paper (Giunchiglia et al., 2021) has explored employing KO techniques to KR methods.
The paper’s analysis of the KO process goes into depth on Ranganathan’s Cannons, which are a little outside my research. The main idea here is that the classification process is grounded in philosophy, or guidelines. With that said, even without the particulars of the Cannons, we can see how this philosophically-guided process will lead to vastly differing out than KR – “For example, the canon of sought heading prescribes that the attributes used to describe the access to a book in a catalogue should be strictly based in accordance with how a user is likely to approach the catalogue.”
KR, on the other hand, unless specifically directed by tooling, is use-agnostic; it describes only data-related connections. The authors identify Aristotle’s Genus and Differentia as the primary conceptual grounding for KR work; Briefly, any thing can be described lexically can be both grouped (e.g., cats) and differentiated (e.g., torties, tabbys, etc).
The remaining bulk of the paper presents a methodology for combining the two approaches.