A Network Theoretical Approach to Assess Knowledge Integration in Information Studies

The paper presents a general approach to assess knowledge integration as a basis to evaluate the performance of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches with respect to their knowledge integration capacity. The method is based on the development of Interdisciplinary-glossaries as tools for the elucidation of the conceptual networks involved in interdisciplinary studies. Such ID-glossaries are used as proxies of the corresponding knowledge integration, which is measured through the structural analysis of the co-occurrence network of terms. This approach is applied to an ID-glossary devoted to the general study of information, called glossariumBITri. The results show the capacity of the approach to detect integration achievements, challenges and barriers. Its qualitative nature is complemented by an enhanced methodology in which both the diversity of disciplines and the knowledge integration can be measured in a bi-dimensional index. To that purpose each contribution to the target ID-glossary is identified by the knowledge domains involved (using a set of knowledge domains adapted from the higher categories of the Universal Decimal Classification), while the integration is measured in terms of the small-world coefficient of the co-occurrence of terms.