Organizing Information

College of Library and Information Services University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 Organizing Information Organizing information is at the heart of information science and is important in many other areas as well. In bibliographic and similar information systems it involves classification as well as the description of documents or other entities; in database management it is known as data modeling; in artificial intelligence, as knowledge representation for expert systems, natural language understanding, and other purposes; in psychology, as the structure of memory and cognition; in linguistics, as syntax and semantics and structure of discourse; in technical writing, as the structure of a composition; in biology it is used on two levels: in the classification of organisms and in the study of information transferred through genes. In all scholarly and scientific fields, organizing information is important for establishing frameworks for thought used in research and teaching. It assists in the formation of useful concepts and it serves to clarify terminology to assist both authors and readers. Many of these topics are coming together in the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Finally, philosophy of knowledge is concerned with the clarification of many of these issues.