Library and Information Science

It is, without saying, one of the most important aspect in information handling to control terms according to their meaning relationship. Not only a few research results have been published in classification and indexing method but also in techniques related to automatic abstracting and mechanical translation.

Some confusion, however, has been found in the use of certain important terms, e.g. sign, code, meaning, denotatum or referent, etc., as well as in the realm where the term “meaning” is employed. This confusion has to be avoided if we wish the effective development of research of the control of meaning.

The writer, therefore, first tried to define the term “meaning” in terms of both linguistics and information handling. Two rather recent works of Laszlo Antal were of great help in this respect.

In the second chapter, emphasis is placed on the means to grasp “meaning” on both word and context levels and then on the method possibly effective to construct word associations. The latter is of necessity to avoid the descrepancy of the use of terms between indexer, or whatever name given to him, and the user, or the one who formulate his demand on information.

In the last chapter, the writer tried to associate “meaning” with the problem of subject searching or retrieval in a concrete form. To clarify the problem, the role and position of control of meaning is to be found in the total retrieval system. In this respect, the interpretation of the term “information”, “data”, “document”, etc. was felt necessary to be clearly defined again. Based on the understanding of the above, some comparison was made among existing means of controlling “meaning”, e.g. those employed in faceted classification, uniterm index, chain procedure, thesauri, etc.