Jason Farradane

Jason Farradane (1906-1989) was an information science pioneer in the UK..

Life

Jason Farradane was born on September 29, 1906 and named Jason Lewkowitsch. In 1929 He graduated in chemistry from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. He worked in industry as a chemist and as a documentalist. During World War II he worked in research at the Ministry of Supply and at the Admiralty. He later became Director of the Centre for Information Science at City University, London. He adopted the surname Farradane, a combination of Faraday and Haldane, two scientists he particularly admired. He died on June 27, 1989.

Contributions

Relational indexing

Farradane is best known for his development of what he called relational indexing. It was, like the CODOC system of Robert Pagès and the “semantic factoring” of James Whitney Perry, an attempt add grammar capable of expressing more relationships between concepts than Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) do.

The basic structure was a triple in the form term-relationship-term where terms represented concepts not words. Such a triple could be elaborated indefinitely. Drawing in his understanding of psychology he identified some eighty different relationships and reduced them to nine main types and used a typewriter-friendly notation.

1. Concurrence /θ for co-occurring or duration.

2. Equivalence /= for same or substitutable.

3. Distinctness /) for imitation, substitution, or differentness.

4. Self-activity /* for intransitive activity.

5. Dimensional /+ for position.

6. Action /- for transitive activity.

7. Association /; e.g. prison being associated with disgrace: prison /; disgrace

8. Appurtenance /( for whole-part relationships, e.g. a pig’s liver: pig /( liver

9. Functional dependence /: for causing, producing, or arising from.

Examples:

• Washing potatoes: potatoes /- washing
• Washed potatoes: potatoes /; washing
• A child receiving a gift: gift /- receiving /; child
• Minicomputer for producing cross-tabulations for statistics: statistics /; cross-tabulations /- producing /; minicomputer

Relational indexing entries quickly become complex and difficult to display. Encoding and query formulation are both difficult, very labor intensive, and unacceptably expensive compared with simple keywords, text words, and Boolean operators.

Other

Farradane was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958 and in 1961 the first academic courses in information science in the UK at the Northampton College of Advanced Technology 1961, now the City University, in London, and where he became Director of the Centre for Information Science in 1966.

Farradane was the founding editor of the Bulletin of the Institute of Information Scientists, a predecessor of the Journal of Information Science, and was the first editor-in-chief of Information Storage and Retrieval, now Information Processing and Management.

Publications

For a list of his writings see Yates-Mercer, P. A. "Bibliography." Journal of Information Science 12, no 1-2 (January 1986): pp. 19–21.

• "The Institute [of Information Scientists]: the first twelve years." The Information Scientist 4, no 4 (1970): 143–151.
• Relational indexing : introduction and indexing. London, Ont. : School of Library and Information Science, the University of Western Ontario, 1977.
• "Relational indexing." Journal of Information Science 1, no 5 (1980): 267-76 & no 6 (313-24.

Awards

• The Institute of Information Scientists established the Jason Farradane Award in his honour in 1979 and awarded it to him in its first year.
• City University, Honorary Doctor of Science, 1986.

Further reading

• Bottle, R. T., Brookes, B. C. & Yates-Mercer, P. A. "Jason Farradane: a biobibliography." Journal of Information Science 12, no 1-2 (January 1986). Special issue: Twenty-five years of teaching information science at the City University, pp. 19–21.
• Brookes, B. C. "Jason Farradane and Relational Indexing," Journal of Information Science 12, no 1-2 (January 1986): 15–18.
• Sweeney, Russell & Tom Brimelow, interviewers. Jason Farradane. Leeds: Department of Librarianship, Leeds Polytechnic, 1976. Videotape, VHS, of interview in 1975; audio tape of same interview.
• Yates-Mercer, P. "Guest editorial: an appreciation of Jason Farradane," Journal of Information Science 15, no 6 (1989) 305–6.
• "Jason Farradane." Wikipedia [1]