ABSTRACT
The discipline of information science per definition deals with data, information and knowledge, and the interrelationships between these concepts. There are many definitions for these concepts, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss different definitions. There are a number of sub-disciplines in information science, inter alia information and knowledge management, information organisation and retrieval, information behaviour and seeking, information ethics, law, philosophy, politics and economics, digital libraries and repositories, indigenous information systems and indigenous knowledge, the information and knowledge society, etc. Common to all these sub-disciplines is that, in all cases, the relationship between data/information/knowledge, humans and (information and communication) technology is studied. In some cases the emphasis is on the relationship between all three components, in others between only two components, for example between humans and information, or between technology and information. Humans typically refer to end users, that is, the people that eventually use the information for work, leisure, study and so forth. Technology currently refers mostly to information and communication technologies in the form of modern e-technologies, but information used to be and can still be organised and managed, etc., in paper-based and other formats. Each sub-discipline in information science has a number of different theories, and these are discussed in the literature in depth, and often quite acrimoniously with little consensus. A few examples are briefly discussed in Section 13.2.
