Information Needs in Information Space

Abstract

Based on the results of Gregory B. Newby’s experiment [1] that an information space of an information system corresponds with the cognitive spaces of its human users, this article further explores the concept of information need. The assumption we explore here is that information needs may appear only when an individual has a partial knowledge of a term. We follow Newby’s approach by constructing an information space with term cooccurence and cognitive spaces with term association using twelve terms in the area of Library and Information Science. When the spaces overlap we can get a similarity between term vectors in the information space and in the cognitive space. We assume that such similarity can show how much a human may know about the term. After analyzing the space, information needs are then identified and situated in a moderate similarity group of terms. Discussions about some considerations in methodology and in interpretation of the results are provided.