KITIYADISAI, Krisana (1991)

Relevance and Information Systems

This thesis points out that relevance has to be explicitly recognised as an important quality of valuable information. Relevance has various meanings according to different disciplinary approaches, e.g. philosophy, law, logic. information science, communication and cognition. These different concepts are discussed and criticised in two chapters. A new approach to the concept of relevance is proposed in which its general concept is considered as an affordance which encompasses all the specific concepts. This approach reflects all their underlying characteristics which are compatible with the assumptions of the logic of norms and affordances, upon which methods of semantic analysis are based. Two case studies are selected for experimenting these concepts which result in a guideline for systematic application in a semiotic framework. [F6803]