Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering

Dr Kecheng Liu, Fellow of the British Computer Society, is a full Professor and holds a Chair of Informatics and e-Business in Business School. He is the Director of Informatics Research Centre (www.irc.rdg.ac.uk), one of the departments in the Business School, University of Reading, UK. He has published over one hundred papers in journals and conferences, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has chaired conferences, written 1 and edited 5 books in the field of informatics and organisational semiotics. He has also been responsible for several research projects. He is Visiting Professor at Fudan University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Dalian University of Technology and the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Science, all in China. He has been invited to deliver lectures in information systems and semiotics in Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Czech, France, Hong Kong, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States.

1. Introduction; Part I. Semiotic Framework and Methods: 2. Understanding semiotics; 3. A semiotic framework for information systems; 4. A semiotic approach to information systems development; 5. Knowledge representation and information analysis; 6. Semantic analysis; 7. Pragmatics and communication; 8. The social layer: modelling organisations as information systems; Part II. Applications: 9. From semiotic analysis to systems design; 10. Semantic temporal databases; 11. Normbase: a new approach to information management; 12. Case study: development of a land resources information system; 13. Case study: development of a test construction system; Appendix A. Semantic templates and surrogate specification; Appendix B. LEGOL applications in the CRIS case; References; Index.