New technologies have made the increased globalization of information resources and services possible. In this situation, it is ethically and intellectually beneficial to protect cultural and information diversity. This paper analyzes the problems of creating ethically based globally accessible and culturally acceptable knowledge representation and organization systems, and foundation principles for the ethical treatment of different cultures are established on the basis of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The concept of``cultural hospitality'', which can act as a theoretical framework for the ethical warrant of knowledge representation and organization systems, is described. This broad discussion is grounded with an extended example of one cultural universal, the concept of time and its expression in calendars. Methods of achieving cultural and user hospitality in information systems are discussed for their potential for creating ethically based systems. It is concluded that cultural hospitality is a promising concept for assessing the ethical foundations of new knowledge representation and organization systems and for planning revisions to existing systems.

A strong definition of aboutness and a theory of its role in information retrieval systems have not been developed. Such a definition and theory may be extracted from the work of T. A. van Dijk. This paper discusses some of the implications of van Dijk's work for bibliographic classification theory. Two kinds of intertextuality are identified: that between documents classified in the same class of the same classification system; and that between the classification system as a text in its own right and the documents that are classified by it. Consideration of the two kinds of intertextuality leads to an investigation of the linguistic/cognitive processes that have been called the ‘translation’ of a document topic into a classificatory language. A descriptive model of the cognitive process of classifying documents is presented. The general design of an empirical study to test this model is suggested, and some problems of implementing such a study are briefly identified. It is concluded that further investigation of the relationships between text linguistics and classification theory and practice might reveal other fruitful intersections between the two fields.

In this article, ethical decision-making methods for creating, revising, and maintaining knowledge representation and organization systems are described, particularly in relation to the global use of these systems. The analysis uses a three-level model and the literature on ethically based decision-making in the social and technical sciences. In addition, methods for making these kinds of decisions in an ethical manner are presented. This multidisciplinary approach is generalizable to other information areas and is useful for encouraging the development of ethics policies for knowledge representation and organization systems and for other kinds of systems or institutions.

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