Bob Losee

Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science
919/962-7150
losee@unc.edu
Manning Hall 302
Pronouns: He/Him/His

Faculty Expertise:

Information retrieval, information, reasoning systems, organizing information, decision making

Education:
BA, MA (Library Science), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
MA, PhD, University of Chicago

Biography:
Bob Losee, a professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), has a doctorate from the University of Chicago. His primary interests are in the study of information itself, the study of organizing and retrieving information, and library operations.  In all of these areas, he is interested in all domains.  Research in the area of information has included a recent book, Information From Processes: Information Creation, Use, and Representation, defining information.  Along with this book is a programming language that can be used to study information applications.   In the area of Information Organization, his primary research emphases are in organizing information in an optimal manner for physical and electronic ordering of documents,  along with determining how and when metadata and subject headings help improve retrieval performance.  Most of Bob’s Information Retrieval research focuses on the relationships between document and query characteristics and their effect on retrieval performance.  Unlike much experimental work, this research produces broad principles that can be applied to any situation where the assumptions of the model are met, and can be used to compute the exact performance that will be obtained.

Courses Regularly Taught:
INLS 520 Organization of Information
INLS 581 Research Methods Overview

Awards and Recognition:
“When Information Retrieval Measures Agree about the Relative Quality of Document Rankings,”  Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51 (9) 2000, 834-840. (Article won Journal of the American Society for Information Science  Best Paper of the Year Award, 2000.)

ASIS Doctoral Forum Dissertation Award 1986.

Selected Publications, Papers, Presentations:

Books:
Information From Processes: About the Nature of Information Creation, Use, and Representation.  New York: Springer, 2012.

Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytic Models of Performance, Boston: Kluwer, 1998.

Articles:
“Combining High Metainformation with High Information Content: The Information-Metainformation Utility Hypothesis.”  Knowledge Organization. 41(2): 2014.  123-130

“Information and Knowledge: Combining Justification, Truth, and Belief. Informing Science.  17, 2014.  75-93.

“The Effect of Assigning a Metadata or Indexing Term on Document Ordering.”  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, In Press (2013).  64(11): 2013, 2191-2200, 2013.

“A Random Walk on an Ontology: Using Thesaurus Structure for Automatic Indexing.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64 (7), 2013, 1330-1344.  Willis and Losee.

“Informational Facts and the Metainformation Inherent in IFacts: The Soul of Data Sciences.”  Journal of Library Metadata, 13, 2013, 59-74.

“Decisions in Thesaurus Construction and Use,” Information Processing & Management, 43 (4), 2007, 958-968.

“Percent Perfect Performance (PPP),” Information Processing & Management. 43 (4), 2007, 1020-1029.

“Is 1 Noun Worth 2 Adjectives? Measuring the Relative Feature Utility,” Information, Processing & Management, 42 (6), 2006, 1248-1259.

“Browsing Mixed Structured and Unstructured Data,” Information Processing & Management, 42 (2), 2006, 440-452.

“A Performance Model of the Length and Number of Subject Headings and Index Phrases,” Knowledge Organization.  31(4) 2004, 245-251.

In the News
https://sils.unc.edu/people/faculty/profiles/Bob-Losee
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