Information Systems Foundations - Karl Popper's third world

Abstract

The various information professions have matured separately over the years, developing different bodies of theory and practice to meet their evolving purposes and needs. A problem arises however, when different information professions address the same knowledge domain and there is no explicit correspondence between the conceptual structures embedded independently in each. In this situation, a knowledge worker involved in the domain is faced with a range of possibly incompatible structures presented in different forms by a range of information professions. This is a common problem that is being exacerbated by the explosion in information production and the widening access to information distribution technology, notably the World Wide Web. Information Systems now need to combine the best of what the information professions in a domain have to offer the domain’s knowledge workers. This paper examines the problem by exploring one of the foundations of the information disciplines - Karl Popper’s 3 Worlds theory, applying it to a case study and suggesting that the Information Systems discipline alone has a sufficiently broad agenda to integrate the various Informatics themes needed to support today’s knowledge workers.