Explaining and alleviating information management indeterminism: A knowledge-based framework

Our research attempted to identify the nature and causes of information management indeterminism in an online research environment and to propose solutions for alleviating this indeterminism. We conducted two empirical studies of information management activities. The first study identified the types and nature of information management indeterminism by evaluating archived texts. The second study focused on four sources of indeterminism: subject area knowledge, classification knowledge, system knowledge, and collaboration knowledge. A knowledge-based design for alleviating indeterminism, which contains a system-generated thesaurus and an inferencing engine, is also proposed in this article.