Discusses the cultural, ontological, and epistemological principles on which knowledge is organized in Japanese culture. Topics discussed include public knowledge and corporate knowledge; cognition, including field dependent knowledge and group dependent knowledge; communication and image oriented knowledge; memory; and patterns of…

The Cobb-Douglas model applied to value added as a function of labor, capital, purchases of information services, and purchases of other input is used to investigate the use of information by the industrial sector of Croatia, Yugoslavia. It is concluded that less than an optimal amount of information resources is being used. (13 references)…

Examines trends in labor and capital resources and the production of the information economy in Hungary, and compares them to trends experienced in other market-oriented countries. A model that considers regional differences in the demand, supply, and life cycle of goods is used to explain secular information sector changes. (Author/CLB)

Presents a description of PLEXUS, an expert system on gardening designed as a referral tool for public libraries by the University of London. Highlights include determining user characteristics, developing the problem statement, the use of semantic categories, and search strategies that modify the original problem statement using Boolean…

Outlines procedures for selecting scientific journals for academic library collections and provides a model which ranks data sources according to their relative weights rather than ranking the journals themselves. Use of the model in scientifically less developed countries is discussed. (Author/LRW)

Examines how informetric characteristics of information retrieval (IR) system databases can be used to help system designers decide what type of file structures would provide the best performance. The development of appropriate models describing database contents is highlighted in this first part of a two-part study. (30 references) (LRW)

This second report on a two-part study on the application of informetrics to information retrieval (IR) system design used models of database contents in a factorial simulation study at the University of Western Ontario. The study explored whether different file structures were better suited for different informetric environments. (32 references)…