MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION OF BASIC PROCEDURES IN DOCUMENTATION,

Certain basic aspects of documentation, especially the relationship of a message to alternate means for its expression and recording were studied. Attention was also directed to various documentation processes in which the message remains invariant, though the symbolism for expressing it may be greatly altered. In considering mathematical formulation, this led to such concepts as the message as a set, which may find expression in an equivalence class of sets, each of which is a version of a given message. The concept of set, in turn, led us to such concepts as sets of sets, sub-sets, and irreducible sub-setsalso sometimes called unit elements. The concepts of mapping and inverse mapping were also shown to be directly involved when dealing with such equivalence classes. These concepts are of essential importance for considering in a uniform and rigorous manner a very wide range of documentation processes ranging from translating from one natural language to another to alphabetical indexing, encoding for machine searching, and abstracting, performed either by people or by programmed machines. Author