Knowledge Space: A Conceptual Basis for the Organization of Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract We propose a new conceptual basis for visualizing the organization of information, or knowledge, which differentiates between the concept “vectors” for a field of knowledge represented in a multidimensional space, and the state “vectors” for a person based on his understanding of these concepts, and the representational “vectors” for information items which might be in a retrieval system which covers a sub space of knowledge. This accommodates the notion of search volume in which the user of a retrieval system can expand or reduce the subspace he searches for relevant information items which have representational vectors with components on basic concept vectors similar to his state vector. The benefits of such a new conceptual framework are explored in this article.