Iranian Journal of Information Processing & Management
Year:2015 | Volume:30 | Issue:3|Papers Count:13

This paper distinguishes between “methodology” and “method” and discusses methodological levels of abductive logic as related to the knowledge classification systems. The purpose is to clarify the application of abductive logic for analyzing knowledge classification systems as an alternative for mainstream logics in the field, i.e. inductive and deductive logic. Methodology used in this paper is conceptual analysis. Abductive logic approaches reality as a social construction. It is obviously an interpretative and constructivist approach. Therefore, its aim is to understand the social phenomena that socially constructed by social agents. Therefore, any given knowledge classification system is a socially constructed phenomenon reflecting subjective biases and prejudices of its creators. Knowledge classification systems aren’t innocent objective systems. They are systems that are determined and restricted by cultural and social forces operating as their conditions of production. Every classification system has some kind of ontological and epistemological commitment. Therefore, we should recognize “alternative” classification systems based on “alternative” ontological and epistemological commitments, as legitimate as current mainstream classification systems. The paper introduces methodological levels of abductive logic and provides LIS professionals with a new and alternative way for analyzing knowledge classification systems as interpretative and semantic social constructions.

The present research has been done to visual representing of knowledge and determining the vacuum and density points of scientific trends of faculty members of the state universities of IRAN in the field of Library & Information Science. Curriculum vitae of each faculty member with census method were collected and their contents analyzed. Then using a checklist, their scientific tendencies were extracted. NodeXL software was used to map out the levels. The results showed that their trends are concentrated in scientometrics, research methods in library & information science, information organization, information resources, psychology, education, management, the Web, knowledge management, academic libraries, information services, information theories and collection management. Apparently, the library & information science community of experts pays little or no attention to library & information science applications in the fields of chemistry, cartography, museum, law, art, school libraries, as well as to independent subject clusters such as minorities in library, information architecture, mentoring in library science, library automation, preservation, oral history, cybernetics, copyright, information marketing and information economy. Lack of efforts on these areas is remarkable.

Information and knowledge management has emerged as major tools for collecting and regulating available data to spread over an entire organ. The present study is to identify the links and boundaries between the two management systems. Co-word analysis method is used as research method since, along with other scientometric techniques it is a parameter for content analysis. Articles accepted for domestic journals and conferences constitute the population of this study. The current research findings indicate that there are 230 and 123 keywords in the field of knowledge management and information management, respectively among which only 8 words are of shared use. In other words, the lexical boundary is %8.52. More specifically, the boundary is made up of the concept of recorded knowledge. The results also showed that knowledge management provides the ground for all management areas to some extent. On the other hand, information management prepares the situation for studying on areas such as medical records or science. We found that information science can be considered as a shared boundary between the two studied areas. Extracting documented keywords for these two management areas is still another finding of this study.

Currently, the main portion of knowledge is stored in electronic texts and documents and for transferring that knowledge effectively, we must use proper methods to gather and retrieve relevant information. Ontologies provide means to produce structured documents and use intelligent search instead of keyword search. Ontology defines the common words and concepts used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. However, developing ontologies is a time consuming and labor work. So, many ontology developers try to facilitate and speed up this process by reusing other resources. In fact, thesaurus contains semantic information and hierarchical structure that make it an appropriate resource for ontology construction. Therefore, we determined to use the thesauri previously developed at Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IRANDOC) to construct ontology in basic sciences domain. At first, we synchronized common concepts in thesauri before integrating them as a macro thesaurus and removed inconsistencies. To reduce the amount of time and human resources which were needed for synchronizing process, Thesaurus Synchronizer was developed to illustrate differences between matched cases of two thesauri. It provides powerful tools for demonstrating differences and suggestions for each of the existing matters. Thus, domain experts synchronized each two thesaurus semiautomatically. Then we merged thesauri and transformed the data format into ISO 25964 standard. The conceptual model have been designed based on the terms and their relationships in the integrated thesaurus and the concept maps that were designed by domain experts for each of basic sciences (Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geology and Mathematics). We Iranian Research Institute for Science and Technology used the methodology called METHONTOLOGY in this stage. The main activity in this methodology is conceptualization. It enables the construction of ontologies at the knowledge level. Ultimately, the ontology was generated by formalizing and implementing the conceptual model in OWL, a web ontology language which is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium. The next step is to refine the relationships to more specific semantic relations. Our domain experts tried to refine some relationships manually but we decided to design an appropriate method for refining the ontology semi-automatically. Also, we need to add more details to our ontology and turn it into heavyweight ontology to get more advantages out of it in formal reasoning. The main aim of this project is to create a standard ontology to be used in information storage and retrieval system.

Pubmed is among the most known medical databases. It uses MESH as a controlled vocabulary tool for facilitating the search process. Recently it has applied a second suggesting system (keywords and phrases) in this regard. Since information systems aim at retrieving the most relevant results, analyzing the efficiency of this new suggestion system and the old MESH terms from users' point of view would be of importance in this regard. As an applied study, this survey has been conducted through distributing a questionnaire during search sessions of users. To this end, a sample of 40 specialists, in the field of medical sciences, was selected through a purposeful sampling method and the results were analyzed using SPSS 16.0. The results show that there is no significant difference between documents relevance when Pubmed suggestions or MESH terms are used during each search session. According to the findings of this study both Pubmed suggestions and MESH terms help the user with better understanding of the concept and they both broaden the terminology of users. At the same time both methods are efficient in relevancy of the retrieved documents.

Ambiguous nouns and adjectives are words with more than one meaning. Having several meanings creates problems in MT particularly in automatic programs where human plays no role in choosing the equivalent target word and there is no context available to the machine. One of the ways to solve the problem is to provide the machine with proper and enough contexts; here by context we mean the collocations of a word. In order to show this we chose English adjectives for our study. We extracted polysemous adjectives from a bilingual English-Persian Medum Dictionary (Hezareh) and checked them all in a bilingual parallel English-Persian Corpus to get the context and collocations for each adjective. Then we recorded all the adjectives with their associate words, context and the meaning provided by the corpus. Then a concordance was created out of these adjectives and their equivalents along with their collocations and a disambiguating program was written for it, so that it could choose the best equivalent for the target adjective according to the highest meaning frequency of the given adjective or its collocation. This program’s reliability was tested by using five translators. Their choices were compared through a statistical method (Cronbach alpha) and their covariance was calculated by SPSS software. The results show that in more than %50 of the cases translators’ choices were the same as the program’s choices. The results of this study could be helpful in MT, bilingual information retrieval, word nets and even in teaching Persian to foreigners.

Aiming to study the freshness of Persian information, this study attempted to explore the indexing speed of Persian newspapers in Google, Yahoo and Bing. The present study was conducted using a webometric method. The population of the study consisted of all online newspapers published in Persian. The study sample was identified using a targeted method. It included those Persian newspapers listed on the MagIran database with their electronic versions regularly published on their respective websites. The results revealed that Google outperforms the two other search engines in terms of timely indexing of the Persian newspapers. Furthermore, it generally enjoys a more consistent and stable indexing model. Yahoo and Bing are not only slower in indexing the newspapers, but also experience a comparably lower consistency level in their indexing models. Yahoo and Bing show to be comparable in their indexing speeds. In this study, the indexing status of Persian newspapers on different internet search engines was investigated for the first time. Results showed that those accessing these newspapers using internet search engines will have a higher chance of accessing their most updated versions using Google.

Rapid development of processing and storage technologies and the success of the Internet have made computing resources cheaper, more powerful and more available than before. This technological trend has enabled the realization of a new computing model called cloud computing. Recently, the state-owned organizations have begun to utilize cloud computing architectures, platforms, and applications to deliver services and meet constituents’ needs. Despite all of the advantages and opportunities of cloud computing technology, there are so many risks that state-owned organizations need to know about before their migration to cloud environment. The purpose of this study is to identify and rank the risk factors of cloud computing in state-owned organizations by making use of IT experts’ opinions. Firstly, by reviewing key articles, a comprehensive list of risk factors were extracted and classified into two categories: tangible and intangible. Then, six experts were interviewed about these risks and their classifications, and 10 risks were identified. After that, process of ranking the risks was done by seeking help from 52 experts and by fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. The results show that experts have identified intangible risks as the most important risks in cloud computing used by state-owned organizations. As the results indicate, "data confidentiality" risk has the highest place among the other risks.

Information Management in universities and academic environments has been a critical issue for their managers in recent years. Some infrastructures like academic websites suggested solutions but they had other problems such as out of dating information. Therfore, many universities have developed information management systems for managing their intellectual properties in recent years. Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) has established its institutional repository named SAED since 1385 (2006). The purpose of this research is assessing SAED from technical aspects. Evaluating research and case study were selected for implementing the research. Data collection tool was a checklist which was constructed by this researchers. Findings revealed that SAED is at average level from technical aspects. But content management and accessibility aspects reduce the usefulness of the system. So, user-centered approach must be applied for improving it. Though archiving and system support are in suitable situation, but increasing users and data might make a challenging situation for it in the future.

The goal of this study is to evaluate expert system features of Iranian selected digital library software in the context of information retrieval. This study was performed using evolutional method using a checklist. In order to gather data, a checklist was prepared with 66 criteria based on the research dimensions (including tools of information retrieval, interface, information database (knowledge), and the strategies used for guidance of users). In preparing the checklist the opinions of LIS experts were used as necessary. The population of this study were 5 selected Iranian Digital Library software namely Pars Azarakhsh, Simorgh, Papyrus, Payam and Parvan. The status of the selected digital library software was investigated based on research dimensions. According to the studied criteria in research, the results showed that selected digital library software are lower than normal from the information recovery point of view and information data base, but as for the interface feature, it is higher than normal range. Also in the dimention of guiding users, the results showed that the most emphasis is on common software features instead of specialized ones. The test of research hypothesis also showed that there is a significant difference between the current status of the features of the software of digital libraries in Iran. A checklist was prepared for evaluation of digital library software in expert systems context. Also the results can be helpful for the software providers to resolve the weaknesses and reinforce the strengths of the software.

This article aims to analyze motivations behind social sciences blog posts citing journal articles in order to find out whether blog citations of scholarly journal articles are good indicators for the societal impact of research. A random sample of 300 social sciences blog posts (out of 1,233 blog posts) from Research Blogging published between 01/01/2012 to 18/06/2014 subjected to content analysis. An existing categorization scheme was used and modified inductively. The 300 blog posts had 472 references including 424 journal articles from 269 different journals. Sixty-one (%22.68) of all journals cited were from the category of social sciences and most of the journals with high frequency were highly cited general science journals such as PNAS and Science. Seventy-five percent of all journals were referenced only once. The average age of articles cited was 5.8 years. The most frequent (38, %12.67) motivation was to ‘neutrally presenting details of a study’. Overall, social science blogs were rather subject-oriented than articleoriented. This means that a considerable number of blog posts were not driven simply by writing about an article, instead bloggers tend to write about their subject of interest and use references to support their argument. The study shows the potential of blog citations as an altmetric measure and as a proxy for assessing the research impact.

This research aimed to study the status of communication skills of librarians and effective factors in this field. A questionnaire was used in this survey for collecting data. Research population consisted of the librarians at the libraries of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Findings showed that the most important factors in interpersonal communication from the librarians' points of views are firstly organizational and then environmental, personal and cultural factors. Also, there is no significant relationship between variables like "education" and "experience" with communication skills of librarians. Furthermore, findings show that the status of librarians' communication skills in all areas of study at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad is the same and there is no significant difference among them. At the end, some recommendations are mentioned for extension of interpersonal communication skills of librarians.