LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2013 (“Essays in Honor of W. Boyd Rayward: Part I,” edited by Alistair Black and Charles van den Heuvel), pp. 429–441. © 2014 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Abstract This paper suggests writing a companion work to the Bourne and Hahn book, History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976 (2003), which would feature milestone improvements in subjec...

There appears to be a quite long-standing assumption that journals in scholarly fields are responsible for two functions: 1) they make public the work being done at a particular time in the field (thus reflecting the knowledge base of the field, and 2) they select what is to be communicated in the field (thus shaping the knowledge base of the field). While it very difficult to determine which o...

Large-scale ontologies are becoming an essential component of many applications including standard search (such as Yahoo and Lycos), ecommerce (such as Amazon and eBay), configuration (such as Dell and PC-Order), and government intelligence (such as DARPA’s High Performance Knowledge Base (HPKB) program). The ontologies are becoming so large that it is not uncommon for distributed teams of peop...

As ever-larger knowledge bases (KBs) are being built, knowledge sharing becomes an aspect of paramount importance in Knowledge Base Management Systems (KBMSs). In this paper, we propose a way of controlling knowledge sharing by means of the LARS (Locks using Abstraction Relationships’ Semantics) approach for concurrency control in KBs. LARS synchronizes transactions through many different granu...

Introduction. Disciplinarity and other forms of differentiation in science have long been studied in the fields of science and technology studies, information science and scientometrics. However, it is not obvious whether these fields are building on each other’s findings. Methods. An analysis is made of 609 articles on disciplinarity selected through a combination of automatic and manual metho...

Virtual Science: Virtuality and Knowledge Acquisition in Science and Cognition Markus F. Peschl and Alexander Riegler The focus of this paper is the process of knowledge acquisition (KA) and which role virtuality plays in this context. We argue that there are three different modes of knowledge acquisition which can be identified both in the domains of cognition and science: the empirical, the “...

The focus of this paper is the process of knowledge acquisition (KA) and which role virtuality plays in this context. We argue that there are three different modes of knowledge acquisition which can be identified both in the domains of cognition and science: the empirical, the “constructive”, and the “synthetic” mode. We show that the method of constructing knowledge in the virtual domain (i.e....