Information Science Glossary

The fundamental unit of information, representing a single binary value (0 or 1) as defined by Shannon's information theory.

A search technique using logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) to combine or exclude terms in a query.

The systematic arrangement of information into categories based on shared characteristics or predefined schemes.

A standardized set of terms used for consistent indexing and retrieval of information.

The active management of data throughout its lifecycle to ensure quality, accessibility, and long-term preservation.

The process of discovering patterns, correlations, and insights from large datasets using statistical and computational methods.

Strategies and processes for ensuring continued access to digital information over time despite technological change.

A set of 15 standardized metadata elements for describing digital resources across disciplines and domains.

In information theory, a measure of the average uncertainty or information content of a message or random variable.

Guidelines that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable to support scientific data management.

The process of assigning terms, keywords, or codes to information resources to facilitate their discovery and retrieval.

The structural design and organization of information environments to support usability and findability.

The competency to identify information needs and to locate, evaluate, and effectively use information.

A state in which the volume of available information exceeds an individual's processing capacity.

The science of searching for and obtaining relevant information from a collection or database.

A data structure mapping terms to the documents in which they appear, enabling efficient full-text search.

The organizational practice of creating, sharing, using, and managing knowledge to achieve strategic objectives.

Descriptive data about other data, used to organize, find, and manage information resources.

A formal representation of concepts, properties, and relationships within a domain of knowledge.

In information retrieval, the proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant to the query.

In information retrieval, the proportion of all relevant documents in a collection that are successfully retrieved.

A vision for the web in which data is structured and linked with well-defined meaning, enabling machine interpretation.

A hierarchical classification system that organizes concepts into parent-child relationships for navigation and discovery.

Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, a statistical measure of how important a word is to a document within a collection.

A controlled vocabulary that includes relationships between terms such as synonyms, broader terms, and narrower terms.