ANALYSIS AND NEWS
FROM ARISTOTLE TO SEMANTIC ANALYSIS
The need to organise information efficiently and reliably is more important than ever, argues Allan Gajadhar
L
ibraries and academies have existed since ancient times to promote and order our understanding of our world. From earliest history, myths and legends arose that
provided some explanation of the natural world and its forces to early humans. Sages and thinkers in ancient cultures around the globe all produced attempts at understanding the natural and supernatural with a variety of ontological concepts. The word ontology itself has its origins in ancient philosophy as the study of being. Early Western philosophers such as Aristotle came up with some of the earliest attempts at categorising knowledge, as well as some of the earliest analysis of the basic notion of ontology, or the study of being. Ontology in the modern world is very much related to the notion of categorisation – categorisation being the expression of structures that organise meaning. In today’s world, the fields of linguistics and information science have adopted these terms in service of the organisation of knowledge. With the explosion of information that began with the advent of publishing, the need to organise information became a necessity. Librarians were among the first to define and use the notion of systematic categorisation of information. The notion of a taxonomy has arisen in order to effectively structure domain-specific knowledge, making it accessible and useful. In today’s world of automation, big data and global connectivity, sensible methods of organising knowledge have become critical to the ability to find and make effective use of information in the vast universe of available data.
The need to find (and cite) relevant knowledge, and the concomitant difficulty in doing so, are fundamental concerns to modern researchers. This holds true in every
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discipline, including the studies of language, humans and society, and of economics, as well as in the ‘hard’ sciences. The task is even greater today, with the explosion of data in every academic, corporate and civic discipline that may have been digitised, but not linked into a broader universe of classification. Data is everywhere, it is a matter of finding it, and making sense of it by linking it to broader, well-known schemes of classification. This is where modern notions of taxonomies and the resultant deep-linking of information provide the modern researcher with invaluable capabilities for finding knowledge.
The life sciences industry offers an example of a field of knowledge where researchers need to make sense of highly diverse, internal and external, information flows stemming from sources such as biomedical literature, patents, clinical trial reports, healthcare records, specialised news outlets and, occasionally, even social media. Without the help of appropriate
information management technologies, it has now become close to impossible for scientists and information professionals to innovate effectively and adhere to the demands of highly regulated, efficient information management.
Optimise scientific information management Innovations rarely come out of a vacuum; it has now become essential for research and development organisations to be acutely aware of prior and ongoing work, both internally and in other teams across their industry.
Given the massive amount of available scientific literature in proprietary and public content repositories, it is essential to be able efficiently to extract from this content the structured information and key insights like: l What are known targets and leads for a given indication?
l What biomarkers might provide early indicators of drug effectiveness or disease prognosis?
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