ROBERT M. LOSEE School of Information and Library Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-3360 U.S.A. Email: losee at unc dot edu Twitter: @WhatIsInfo

Interests:
My primary intellectual interests are in Information Science (the rigorous study of information) and Library Science (the rigorous study of libraries). Here are my key interests and scientific questions. I love conducting research in the theories and related practices associated with the retrieval, organization, and measurement of information. In many areas, my interests overlap with Computer Science and Philosophy, and I read moderately in those academic areas. My view of the Science of Information is described in the last chapter of my latest book, Information From Processes: About the Nature of Information Creation, Use, and Representation. I respect any research methodology that usually leads to improved performance.

Courses:

• Summer 2013 -- INLS 780 Sec 001 -- Research Methods
  
• Any semester -- Independent Study. Topics might include What is Information (Read Information From Processes and apply to your own areas of interest), Automatic Indexing of Text and/or Images, Retrieval and Indexing Performance Measurement and/or Modeling, Information Modeling, Knowledge Management, Library Operations (Management Science)
  

Books:

• Information From Processes: About the Nature of Information Creation, Use, and Representation, Springer, 2012 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31190-1 ). Book's web site. Can be ordered from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. Available in most library systems that have Springer electronic books by clicking here (read or scan the "Preface" in the Front matter first). Note that patrons of libraries or institutions that have electronic copies of the book can order a printed soft-cover copy through Springer's MyCopy program that will cost about $25 (U.S. dollars).
• Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytic Models of Performance (Information Retrieval Series), Kluwer, 1998.
  Chapters on Quality of Document Ranking, Ranking Performance with One Term (most important chapter), Linguistic Ranking Performance, and Bibliography
• Research and Evaluation for Information Professionals (Library and Information Series), Academic Press, 1993. (Losee and Worley.)
• The Science of Information: Measurement and Applications, (Library and Information Series), Academic Press, 1990.

Most recent and most interesting published articles:

• The Effect of Assigning a Metadata or Indexing Term on Document Ordering, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 2013, In Press. Crudely put, this addresses what 1 term in 1 document does to retrieval performance. The associated software that validates these results is at http://ils.unc.edu/~losee/ima.
• A Random Walk on an Ontology: Using Thesaurus Structure for Automatic Indexing, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 2013, In Press. Willis and Losee.
• Informational Facts and the Metainformation Inherent in IFacts: the Soul of Data Sciences, Journal of Library Metadata. 2013.
• Decisions in Thesaurus Construction and Use, Information Processing & Management. 43 (4), 2007, 958-968. (published article). Continuing this work is "Vocabulary Conversion: Performance with Controlled and Uncontrolled Terms and Tags" UNC-CH SILS Technical Report TR-2008-02.
• Percent Perfect Performance (PPP), Information Processing & Management. 43 (4), 2007, 1020-1029. (published article)
• Is 1 Noun Worth 2 Adjectives? Measuring the Relative Feature Utility, Information Processing & Management. 42 (5) 2006, 1248-1259. (published article)
• Browsing Mixed Structured and Unstructured Data, Information Processing & Management. 42 (2) 2006, 440-452. (published article)
• Are 2 Document Clusters Better Than 1? The Cluster Performance Question for Information Retrieval, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 56 (1) 2005, 106-108. (published article). (Losee and Church)
• A Performance Model of the Length and Number of Subject Headings and Index Phrases, Knowledge Organization. 31 (4) (2004), 245-251.
• Information Retrieval with Distributed Databases: Analytic Models of Performance, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 15, 2004, 18-27. (published article). (Losee and Church)
• Adaptive Organization of Tabular Data for Display, Journal of Digital Information. 4 (1) April 2003. URL is http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-106/95
• Optimal User-Centered Knowledge Organization and Classification Systems: Using Non-Reflected Gray Codes, Journal of Digital Information. 2 (3) March 2002. URL is http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-49/50
• Term Dependence: A Basis for Luhn and Zipf Models, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52 (12), pp. 1019-1025, 2001. (published article.)
• Natural Language Processing In Support of Decision-Making: Phrases and Part-of-Speech Tagging, Information Processing & Management, 37 (6), pp. 769-787, 2001. (published article.)
• When Information Retrieval Measures Agree about the Relative Quality of Document Rankings, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51 (9), pp. 834-840, 2000. (published article.) (Won JASIS Best Paper of the Year Award, 2000.)
• Measuring Search Engine Quality and Query Difficulty, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (10), pp. 882-889, 1999. (Losee & Paris) (published article.)
• Communication Defined as Complementary Informative Processes, Journal of Information, Communication, and Library Science, 5(3), pp 1-15: 1999. (published article.)
• Browsing Document Collections: Automatically Organizing Digital Libraries and Hypermedia using the Gray Code, Information Processing & Management, 33 (2), pp. 175-192, 1997. (published article.)
• A Discipline Independent Definition of Information, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48 (3), pp. 254-269, 1997. (published article) This work is based on a definition of information that I proposed in The Science of Information (Academic Press, 1990.) (Here's a related work on information as a measure of quality of databases, information systems, or libraries)
• Text Windows and Phrases Differing by Discipline, Location in Document, and Syntactic Structure, Information Processing & Management, 32 (6), pp. 747-767, 1996. (Here's a related work on migrating sublanguage terms in hard and soft sciences and here is the pdf full text of this article)
• Comparing Boolean and Probabilistic Information Retrieval Systems across Disciplines and Queries, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48 (2), pp. 143-156, 1997. (published article)
• Learning Syntactic Rules and Tags with Genetic Algorithms for Information Retrieval and Filtering: An Empirical Basis for Grammatical Rules, Information Processing & Management, 32(2), pp. 185-197, 1996. (published article)
• How to Study Classification Systems and Their Appropriateness for Individual Institutions, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 19 (3/4) 1995, 45-58.
• Upper Bounds for Retrieval Performance and Their Use Measuring Performance and Generating Optimal Boolean Queries: Can it Get Any Better Than This? Information Processing & Management, 30(2), pp. 193-204, 1994.
• Term Dependence: Truncating the Bahadur Lazarsfeld Expansion, Information Processing & Management, 30(2), pp. 293-303, 1994. (published article)
• Seven Fundamental Questions for the Science of Library Classification, Knowledge Organization, 20 (2), pp. 65-70, 1993.
• A Gray Code Based Ordering for Documents on Shelves: Classification for Browsing and Retrieval, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43(4), 312-322, 1992. (published article) (Here's a related work on browsing and classification in libraries)
• Minimizing Information Overload: The Ranking of Electronic Messages, Journal of Information Science, 15(3), pp. 179-189, 1989.
• Integrating Boolean Queries in Conjunctive Normal Form with Probabilistic Retrieval Models, Information Processing & Management, 24(3), pp. 315-321, 1988. (Losee & Bookstein)
• Parameter Estimation for Probabilistic Document Retrieval Models, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 39(1), pp. 8-16, 1988. (Performance with different Bayesian Relevance Feedback techniques.) Related work comparing dependence vs. independence with binary and two Poisson term distribution models.)

Software:
Some more recent software I've developed:

• IMA, Indexing and Metadata Advantage. Gawk code provided.
• CHIPL, Chapel Hill Information Processing Language. C++ code provided.
• Nyltiac, An information retrieval system designed to illustrate a variety of models, for research and classroom use. Coded in Java.

Some Special Topics Courses I've enjoyed teaching:

• What Is Information?
• Language and Information
• Library Operations
• Strategic Information
• Information Economics
• Optimal Informative Systems
• Machine Learning
• Knowledge Management and Data Warehousing

Master's Papers and Doctoral Dissertations and Committees

Here are some US News rankings for ALA accredited LIS masters programs and specialities. For those interested in managing information systems, here are some other US news rankings. For those interested primarily in computers, consider this ranking.

Last Updated: Jan 27, 2013
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