EXPLAINING AND ALLEVIATING INFORMATION MANAGEMENT INDETERMINISM - A KNOWLEDGE-BASED FRAMEWORK

Our research attempted to identify the nature and causes of informatio n management indeterminism in an online research environment and to pr opose solutions for alleviating this indeterminism. We conducted two e mpirical studies of information management activities. The first study identified the types and nature of information management indetermini sm by evaluating archived texts. The second study focused on four sour ces of indeterminism: subject area knowledge, classification knowledge , system knowledge, and collaboration knowledge. A knowledge-based des ign for alleviating indeterminism, which contains a system-generated t hesaurus and an inferencing engine, is also proposed in this article.