Thursday, August 15, 2013

Messiness as a Virtue - Question 3

"3. Relate what Weinberger is saying about the definitional view and the prototype view to the information behavior models presented in this course."

Well, Weinberger's explanation of the definitional view - Aristotle's neat and tidy system of classifying everything in a hierarchichal fashion - is traditionally used in libraries to organize the books, serials, etc. The Dewey Decimal system is a great example of a definitional view of the world - everything is defined and organized into a category, and assigned a number. The ASK model (Information Search and Retrieval), which follows a flowchart of steps to find information, is a definitional model of information behavior.

The prototype view, which Weinberger explains as "concepts can be clear without having clear definitions if they're organized around undisputed examples, or prototypes," (Weinberger, p 185) is based more along the lines of relationships between objects or data, not the definition of the item itself. Weinberger gives several examples of this theory, based on Eleanor Rosch's work with different cultures identifying similar concepts, such as colors. It was very interesting to me to find out how few groups of colors people across the globe actually identify. This model is more like Devin's Sense-Making Model, which uses a more fluid structure to relate data to the user's need.  

Weinberger discusses the prototype model and the Semantic web extensively in Chapter 10, and I found his interpretation of RDF easier to understand than other explanations that I have read.  Using the triplicate relationship model, RDF allows people to connect data points by relationship, in a richer way than using a point-to-point, or linking, system.  Currently, libraries are attempting to move towards this relationship-orientated data searching model.

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