Fragmentation of knowledge

Basic analytic and rational methods (such as those of the sciences) are often seen to be at odds with other fields of knowledge. There is no framework or comprehensive construct in which to relate the tremendous volume of ideas, data and insights which every person meets at work and at home through the years. This results in confusion and loss of values. This failure to have an intellectual framework which would relate the variety of types of insight, knowledge and data tends to reinforce narrow specialization.

Lack of integration of the knowledge generated by researchers with differing geographic and functional backgrounds seriously limits the formulation of effective policies.

The majority of systems for organizing knowledge (as reflected in different kinds of information) make use of well-defined breakdowns by category into hierarchies, or are based on title or subject keywords (possibly selected from a thesaurus), or are limited to an author of the work in question. The emphasis is placed on indexing the document and not on the concepts in it (unless they are reflected in the title). The result is that a limited number of keywords become overused with little possibility of distinguishing between the meanings behind each usage, and with little possibility of exploring the relationships between concepts which make up the body of knowledge. In particular, there are no means for handling the level of abstraction of a concept and indicating its ability to interrelate other concepts, particularly those which are either common to several disciplines or integrate the conceptual structures of several disciplines.

The lack of more powerful means of organizing knowledge encourages institutions to implement simplistic information and organization systems which do not match in complexity the networks of problems on which they are expected to focus. Libraries are unable to highlight documents containing concepts of progressively higher degrees of interdisciplinary power, because such publications are categorized by the most prominent topic in the title. Bookshops reflect this situation with an even simpler organization of their publications. In both bookshops and libraries, unless either the title or the author are known, it is almost impossible to locate material dealing with interrelated concepts, or concepts not mentioned in the title.