i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

14 September 2009

What is meaning? Where is meaning?  We impose meaning on the world by "carving it up" into concepts and categories.  We interact daily with a bewildering variety of objects and information types, and we constantly make choices about how to understand and organize them.  The conceptual and category boundaries we impose treat some things or instances as equivalent and others as different.  Sometimes we do this implicitly and sometimes we do it explicitly.  We do this as members of a culture and language community, as individuals, and as members of organizations or instutitions.  The mechanisms and outcomes of our categorization efforts differ across these contexts.  In most cases the resulting categories are messier than our information systems and applications would like, and understanding why and what to do about it are essential skills for information professionals.