Friday 31 May 2013
THE ESIP FEDERATION
The Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is an open networked community that brings together science, data and information technology practitioners. On an individual level, participation in the ESIP Federation is beneficial because it provides an intellectual commons to expose, gather and enhance in-house capabilities in support of an organization’s own mandate. In this forum, practioners work together on interoperability efforts across Earth and environmental science allowing self-governed and directed groups to emerge around common issues, ebbing and flowing as the need for them arises. These efforts catalyze connections across organizations, people, systems and data allowing for improved interoperability in distributed systems. By virtue of working in the larger community, ESIP members experience the network effect, which enables more coordinated cyberinfrastructure across domain-specific communities. Using this open, community-based, discipline and agency neutral approach, the ESIP Federation has a 14-year track record of success and continued growth.
Information and Computer Science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Information and Computer Science (ICS) or Computer and Information Science (CIS) (plural forms, i.e. Sciences, may also be used) is a field that emphasizes both computing and informatics, upholding the strong association between the fields of information sciences and computer sciences and treating computers as a tool rather than a field.
Computing Paradigm
Due to the distinction between computers and computing, some research groups wholly replace "computer" with "computing" or "Datalogy", creating names such as Computing and Information Science. Languages may also entirely omit the association: for example, computer science in French is known as informatique.
Education
Universities may confer degrees of ICS and CIS, not to be confused with a more specific Bachelor of Computer Science or respective graduate Computer Science degrees.
Information and Computer Science (ICS) or Computer and Information Science (CIS) (plural forms, i.e. Sciences, may also be used) is a field that emphasizes both computing and informatics, upholding the strong association between the fields of information sciences and computer sciences and treating computers as a tool rather than a field.
Computing Paradigm
Due to the distinction between computers and computing, some research groups wholly replace "computer" with "computing" or "Datalogy", creating names such as Computing and Information Science. Languages may also entirely omit the association: for example, computer science in French is known as informatique.
Education
Universities may confer degrees of ICS and CIS, not to be confused with a more specific Bachelor of Computer Science or respective graduate Computer Science degrees.
Institute for Scientific Information
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, became known as Thomson ISI and now is part of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters.
ISI offered bibliographic database services. Its specialty: citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these are available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them. The database not only provides an objective measure of the academic impact of the papers indexed in it, but also increases their impact by making them more visible and providing them with a quality label. There is some evidence suggesting that appearing in this database can double the number of citations received by a given paper.
The ISI also publishes the annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracks. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published research record.[citation needed]
A list of over 14,000 journals is maintained by the ISI. The list includes over 1100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listing is based on published selection criteria and is an important indicator of journal quality and impact.
ISI publishes Science Watch, a newsletter which identifies every two months one paper published in the previous two years as a "fast breaking paper" in each of 22 broad fields of science, such as Mathematics (including Statistics), Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.[citation needed] The designations are based on the number of citations and the largest increase from one bimonthly update to the next. Articles about the papers often include comments by the authors.
The ISI also publishes a list of highly cited researchers, one of the factors included in the Academic Ranking of World Universities published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
ISI offered bibliographic database services. Its specialty: citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these are available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them. The database not only provides an objective measure of the academic impact of the papers indexed in it, but also increases their impact by making them more visible and providing them with a quality label. There is some evidence suggesting that appearing in this database can double the number of citations received by a given paper.
The ISI also publishes the annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracks. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published research record.[citation needed]
A list of over 14,000 journals is maintained by the ISI. The list includes over 1100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listing is based on published selection criteria and is an important indicator of journal quality and impact.
ISI publishes Science Watch, a newsletter which identifies every two months one paper published in the previous two years as a "fast breaking paper" in each of 22 broad fields of science, such as Mathematics (including Statistics), Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.[citation needed] The designations are based on the number of citations and the largest increase from one bimonthly update to the next. Articles about the papers often include comments by the authors.
The ISI also publishes a list of highly cited researchers, one of the factors included in the Academic Ranking of World Universities published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Highly Cited
"ISI Highly Cited" is a database of "highly cited researchers"—scientific researchers whose publications are most often cited in academic journals over the past decade, published by the Institute for Scientific Information. Inclusion in this list is taken as a measure of the esteem of these academics and is used, for example, by the Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The methodology for inclusion is to take the upper percentiles based on citation counts of all articles indexed in the Scientific Citation Databases in a 10-year, rolling time period. Each article in the data is assigned to one or more of 21 categories, based on the ISI classification of the journal in which the article was published. Those on the Highly Cited Researcher list constitute (in the terms stated above) the 250 most cited researchers of each category in the specified time period.
The categories are as follows:
Agricultural Sciences Biology & Biochemistry Chemistry Clinical Medicine Computer Science Ecology/Environment Economics/Business Engineering Geosciences Immunology Materials Science Mathematics Microbiology Molecular Biology & Genetics Neuroscience Pharmacology Physics Plant & Animal Science Psychology/Psychiatry Social Sciences - General Space Sciences
The publication list and biographical details supplied by the researchers are freely available online, although general access to the ISI citation database is by subscription.
Information science
Information science (or information studies) is an interdisciplinary field primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, and dissemination of information.Practitioners within the field study the application and usage of knowledge in organizations, along with the interaction between people, organizations and any existing information systems, with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding information systems. Information science is often (mistakenly) considered a branch of computer science. However, it is actually a broad, interdisciplinary field, incorporating not only aspects of computer science, but often diverse fields such as archival science, cognitive science, commerce, communications, law, library science, museology, management, mathematics, philosophy, public policy, and the social sciences.
Information science should not be confused with information theory or library science. Information theory is the study of a particular mathematical concept of information, while library science is a field related to libraries which uses some of the principles of information science.
Scope and approach
Information science focuses on understanding problems from the perspective of the stakeholders involved and then applying information and other technologies as needed. In other words, it tackles systemic problems first rather than individual pieces of technology within that system. In this respect, information science can be seen as a response to technological determinism, the belief that technology "develops by its own laws, that it realizes its own potential, limited only by the material resources available and the creativity of its developers. It must therefore be regarded as an autonomous system controlling and ultimately permeating all other subsystems of society."[2]
Many universities have entire colleges, departments or schools devoted to the study of information science, while numerous information science scholars can be found in disciplines such as communication, computer science, law, library science, and sociology. Several institutions have formed an I-School Caucus (see List of I-Schools), but there are numerous others besides these with comprehensive information foci.
Within information science, attention has been given in recent years to human–computer interaction, groupware, the semantic web, value sensitive design, iterative design processes and to the ways people generate, use and find information.
Definitions of information science
An early definition of Information science (going back to 1968, the year when American Documentation Institute shifted name to American Society for Information Science and Technology) is:
“Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability. It is concerned with that body of knowledge relating to the origination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, transformation, and utilization of information. This includes the investigation of information representations in both natural and artificial systems, the use of codes for efficient message transmission, and the study of information processing devices and techniques such as computers and their programming systems. It is an interdisciplinary science derived from and related to such fields as mathematics, logic, linguistics, psychology, computer technology, operations research, the graphic arts, communications, library science, management, and other similar fields. It has both a pure science component, which inquires into the subject without regard to its application, and an applied science component, which develops services and products” (Borko, 1968, p.3).
Some authors use informatics as a synonym for information science. This is especially true when related to the concept developed by A. I. Mikhailov and other Soviet authors in the mid sixties, which suggested that informatics is a discipline related to the study of Scientific Information. Informatics is difficult to precisely define because of the rapidly evolving and interdisciplinary nature of the field.
Regional differences and international terminology complicate the problem. Some people note that much of what is called "Informatics" today was once called "Information Science" at least in fields such as Medical Informatics. For example, when library scientists began also to use the phrase "Information Science" to refer to their work, the term informatics emerged:
in the United States as a response by computer scientists to distinguish their work from that of library science, and
in Britain as a term for a science of information that studies natural, as well as artificial or engineered, information-processing systems.
Another term that is debated to a be a synonym for "information studies" is "information systems". Brian Campbell Vickery's Information Systems (1973) places information systems within IS. Ellis, Allen, & Wilson (1999) is, on the other hand a bibliometric investigation describing the relation between two different fields: "Information science" and "information systems".
Information science should not be confused with information theory or library science. Information theory is the study of a particular mathematical concept of information, while library science is a field related to libraries which uses some of the principles of information science.
Scope and approach
Information science focuses on understanding problems from the perspective of the stakeholders involved and then applying information and other technologies as needed. In other words, it tackles systemic problems first rather than individual pieces of technology within that system. In this respect, information science can be seen as a response to technological determinism, the belief that technology "develops by its own laws, that it realizes its own potential, limited only by the material resources available and the creativity of its developers. It must therefore be regarded as an autonomous system controlling and ultimately permeating all other subsystems of society."[2]
Many universities have entire colleges, departments or schools devoted to the study of information science, while numerous information science scholars can be found in disciplines such as communication, computer science, law, library science, and sociology. Several institutions have formed an I-School Caucus (see List of I-Schools), but there are numerous others besides these with comprehensive information foci.
Within information science, attention has been given in recent years to human–computer interaction, groupware, the semantic web, value sensitive design, iterative design processes and to the ways people generate, use and find information.
Definitions of information science
An early definition of Information science (going back to 1968, the year when American Documentation Institute shifted name to American Society for Information Science and Technology) is:
“Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability. It is concerned with that body of knowledge relating to the origination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, transformation, and utilization of information. This includes the investigation of information representations in both natural and artificial systems, the use of codes for efficient message transmission, and the study of information processing devices and techniques such as computers and their programming systems. It is an interdisciplinary science derived from and related to such fields as mathematics, logic, linguistics, psychology, computer technology, operations research, the graphic arts, communications, library science, management, and other similar fields. It has both a pure science component, which inquires into the subject without regard to its application, and an applied science component, which develops services and products” (Borko, 1968, p.3).
Some authors use informatics as a synonym for information science. This is especially true when related to the concept developed by A. I. Mikhailov and other Soviet authors in the mid sixties, which suggested that informatics is a discipline related to the study of Scientific Information. Informatics is difficult to precisely define because of the rapidly evolving and interdisciplinary nature of the field.
Regional differences and international terminology complicate the problem. Some people note that much of what is called "Informatics" today was once called "Information Science" at least in fields such as Medical Informatics. For example, when library scientists began also to use the phrase "Information Science" to refer to their work, the term informatics emerged:
in the United States as a response by computer scientists to distinguish their work from that of library science, and
in Britain as a term for a science of information that studies natural, as well as artificial or engineered, information-processing systems.
Another term that is debated to a be a synonym for "information studies" is "information systems". Brian Campbell Vickery's Information Systems (1973) places information systems within IS. Ellis, Allen, & Wilson (1999) is, on the other hand a bibliometric investigation describing the relation between two different fields: "Information science" and "information systems".
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