Introduction to a Semiotic of Scientific Meaning, and Its Implications for Access to Scientific Works on the Web
Frances Morrissey · Cataloging & Classification Quarterly · 2002
SUMMARY Formal scientific communication is constituted by the documentation and dissemination of concepts through scientific works of accepted genre. Using analysis based on Peirce's ten semiotic triads and Eco's connotative semiotics, a scientific work can be identified as a trivalent compound connotative semiotic. It is concluded that a subject approach to document identification and retrieval may be based on document metadata, subject indexing, documentary surrogates, document full-text, the faceted indexes of XML Topic Maps, the graphics of Kohonen Self Organized Maps, and citation histories presented as mappings of co-citation clusters. Any and all of these approaches may relate to any or all of the three classes of knowledge content outlined above as being characteristic of a scientific work. Numerical analysis by neural networks of any of these characteristics of a document could lead to production of a “fingerprint” identifying the document and specifying its knowledge content.