From Encylcopedism to DomainBased Ontology for Knowledge Management: The Evolution of the Sachs Clas

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From Encylcopedism to Domain-Based Ontology for
Knowledge Management The Evolution of the
Sachs Classification

• Moshe Y. Sachs, New York NY USA
•  
• Richard P. Smiraglia, Palmer School of Library
  and Information Science, Long Island University,
  Brookville NY 11548 USA

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Agenda

• The Worldmark Encyclopedia
• The Sachs Classification
• Encyclopedism
• Phenomenology
• Post-modern Ontology
• Domain- and Ecology-Specific
• Knowledge Management

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The Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations

• First published in 1960
• Supranationaltranscends the boundaries of
  nation-states
• Geographical enterprise
• Geographically-specific information ecology

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The Sachs Classification

• Ecology-based communities of local geographers
  as the source of warrant
• Hierarchical, expansible, expandible
• Based on the natural occurrence of thought as it
  evolves in academehence academic warrant
• Open ontological method shaped by communities of
  scholarship, politics, and culture
• Remains open to the evolution of disciplines,
  domains, and ecologies

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Basis in Phenomenology

• Husserl, Edmund. 1913. Ideas General
  introduction to pure phenomenology
• Isolates (eideia) absolute and independent
  entities
• Ego-acts (noesis) human perception framed by
  experience
• Objects (noems) perceived isolates

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Phenomenological epistemology

• Noesis and noem bracket each eideia
• Ego-act and perception bracket each isolate
• Circular relationship
• The method must take into account both the
  intentional human perception and the object
  perceived

Eideia     noesis ?
noem perception
object
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Noesis

• A very real tree
• Noesis sees
• Shade
• A place for nice children to swing
• A place for daring children to scrape knees
• Needles and cones
• For lovely Christmas decor
• Mess to be cleaned up
• Pastoral green against the sky
• In the way of new construction

?
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Noesis in SC

• Open knowledge base
• Hierarchy of isolates
• Hyperlinked noemes
• Yet, incomplete only geographica carefully
  worked out
• http//www.sachs-classification.org/

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Reflecting Post-Modernist Influence

• Mai (1999) suggested that post-modern
  organizations of knowledge can no longer seek
  universality in their scope
• Hjørland and Albrechtsen (1999) concurred,
  suggesting that increased inter-disciplinarity
  and multi-disciplinarity in classification
  designa postmodern approachcould be anchored in
  discourse communities
• Albrechtsen (2000) described information
  ecologiessocio-technical environments that
  involve a diversity of actors yielding
  self-organizing systems for knowledge
  organization

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Knowledge Management

• The systematic accumulation, ordering,
  manipulation and retrieval of specific knowledge
  in an information ecology.
• Tacit and Explicit knowledge.
• Academic warrant, or ecology-based ontology,
  extended epistemologically to the concept of
  information ecology.

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SC and KM

• Tacit knowledge as it emerges, can be nurtured by
  affiliation with an environment in which a tool
  such as the SC is available for perusal. Concepts
  can be recorded in the index and hyperlinked to
  the appropriate points within the hierarchical
  array.
• Phenomenological analysis of any given phenomenon
  encourages the gathering of tacit perception as
  well as the concretizing of eidetic isolates. As
  a given segment of knowledge grows and gains
  credibility within the domain a facet formula
  will emerge to describe the placement of the
  distributed relatives within the schema.
• Actors within a given information ecology
  equipped with an SC-based knowledge management
  tool can become the interactive managers of an
  ever evolving knowledge base.

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Ontological promise

• Ontology for the ordering of digital libraries.
• The parallel development of the Worldmark
  Encyclopedia and the Sachs Classification
  represent a demonstrable turning point in the
  history of the development of 20th century
  classification.