The Future of Information Architecture: Conceiving as Better Way to Understand Taxonomy, Network and Intelligence

Citation

Calvert, P. (2010), "The Future of Information Architecture: Conceiving as Better Way to Understand Taxonomy, Network and Intelligence", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 353-353. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011033756

This is not a book I can recommend to most readers of this journal. The only ones who would find it relevant to their practice, indeed perhaps the only ones, who could truly understand it, are those interested in the philosophy of information and knowledge, and already familiar with standard theories of ontology in information science. That is Baofu's field, and in it he is a well respected thinker and writer of at least fourteen previous books. Here he presents some more of his recent thinking about the nature of information, this time using theories based on existential dialectics.

The author claims that contrary to scholarly thinking currently taken for granted, the recurrent debate on the explanation of the most basic categories of information (such as space, time, causation, quality and quantity) has been misunderstood, with the effect that there exist some deeper categories and principles behind these explanations of information – with implications for our theoretical understanding of reality in general.

While presenting some of his arguments about taxonomy, the author uses some examples from information management. He lists the features of the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Library of Congress Classification systems, with some brief comparison between them, and then introduces faceted classification as a variation from the more rigid structures of traditional schemes. There are only two sources for this section, one is an article from Wikipedia and the other is a web site. Neither appears to be authoritative, which seems a contrast to the rest of the book, which will be appreciated by theorists of information science.