Page 94 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.47, 2021

AN Lu, CHEN Miaomiao, SHEN Yan & LI Gang / The basic categories and core propositions of information science with Chinese characteristics 093

[12]
with developed countries . This is also very important for Chinese information science to change
the role from an information provider to a knowledge provider and whether it could enlarge the
field of research and add more functions.
As the importance of knowledge increased rapidly, the focus of information organization
was gradually shifted to propositions and theories relating to knowledge. The approaches and
steps for knowledge flow processing, managing and sequencing turn to be the basic problems
that information science needs to solve. The information community has conducted extensive
discussions on the concept of knowledge, including knowledge acquisition, storage, organization,
and service. QIAN Xuesen had stated that intelligence is activated knowledge and spiritual
wealth [13] . Among the phenomenon of information such as information collecting, sequencing,
disseminating, utilizing and absorbing, sequencing plays a leading role in distinguishing the
boundaries between the discipline of information science and other disciplines. The basic goal of
intelligence work is to study the sequencing of knowledge, which may help index and organize
knowledge, establish an efficient and orderly information structure and meet the knowledge needs
of different fields with swift response. The essence of sequencing is to follow the internal logical
relations and external characteristics of objective things, implementing the transformation of
information sets from an unordered state to an ordered state. The association between things is
an inherent property, by which knowledge units are linked and in order. Nevertheless, finding the
connections is a difficult task. To achieve the sequencing of knowledge, knowledge organization
should be based on the connections among information , which is reflected in two aspects: users’
[14]
information retrieval and self-organization of objective knowledge. Users’ information retrieval
mainly uses situational tasks to conduct targeted research on user cognition and social cognition.
The core of self-organization is knowledge linking . Every approach of knowledge organization
[15]
is based on the logical connection of knowledge to store and retrieve. The connection of knowledge
is also the starting point of knowledge organization and knowledge discovery. The sequencing and
connection of knowledge together constitute an effective information management organizational
system. Based on the above analysis, this paper puts forward the following propositions about
information organization:

Proposition No.1: At present, information organization needs to be transformed from the physical level
of literature units to the cognitive level of knowledge units.
Proposition No.2: The core goal of information organization is sequencing and linking of knowledge.

Information retrieval is the next step after information organization, which is also one of the
ways to test the effectiveness of information organization. It is a process that finds the information
you need from a large number of sources with the help of retrieval tools according to certain
information requirement. Generally, information retrieval includes data retrieval, full text retrieval,
article retrieval and knowledge retrieval. As a practical discipline, although information science