Abstract
The examination of a practical issue with a web site has led, in this paper, directly to the consideration of the need for, and an assessment of the impact of, an approach based on fundamental theories of ‘what is’, to examine what information systems research is and the relations of its component areas of endeavour. The paper presents an examination of the use of the philosophical field of ontologies, and specifically the use of the ontological approaches upon which to base categories of information systems research activities. This theoretical analysis is intended to be used as the basis from which to develop a methodology to undertake the development of the categorial scheme for the web site that initiated the research.
Table of Contents
Since 1995, one of the authors (JL) has been maintaining a resource on the World Wide Web with the basic aim of providing a central point from which academic authors publishing in the information systems domain can obtain useful information on the publications serving that domain (Lamp, 1995). The database now contains information on 349 journals, and was accessed over 7500 times in February 2004. As the number of journals included in the database increases, so also does the difficulty of accurately identifying journals relevant to a particular query from within the database. There is a basic searching facility that simply matches a search term to descriptive entries in the database but, in common with most text searches implemented on a relational database management system (DBMS), there is no facility for maintaining result sets and refining searches through the manipulation of result sets (Ramakrishnan and Gehrke, 2003).
A number of users have asked whether it would be possible to categorise the journals according to their subject area. This has led to a research project, the full scope of which has been reported elsewhere (Lamp and Milton, 2003), but a key part of which is the determination of relevant categorisation schemes for information systems research, and the relations between those categories. It has also raised important questions about the nature of the discipline of information systems, the journals themselves, the articles published in them, and the readers of those journals. A key finding of Lamp and Milton (2003) was the lack of widespread adoption of any categorial scheme over the domain of information systems research. This is in apparent contradiction with views expressed by information systems researchers, as researchers and as journal editors (Lamp, 2002), supporting the need for such a scheme.
We assert that the artefacts of research (i.e. journal articles and other publications) are real, having an existence outside the cognition of their authors and readers. The question then arises as to how we can categorise these objects.
The method of this paper is as follows:
First, we establish that the information systems research domain is diverse.
Second, we examine the applicability of philosophical ontology as a tool to explore the diverse categorisation of the reality of information systems research and its community; in particular, the nature of the real artefacts, how people relate to that reality, and to identify a philosophy upon which to build methods for analysis.