Cognitive space and information space

This article works towards realization of exosomatic memory for information systems. In exosomatic memory systems, the information spaces of systems will be consistent with the cognitive spaces of their human users. A method for measuring concept relations in human cognitive space is presented: the paired comparison survey with Principal Components Analysis. A study to measure the cognitive spaces of 16 research participants is presented. Items measured include relations among seven TREC topic statements as well as 17 concepts from the topic statements. A method for automatically generating information spaces from document collections is presented that uses term cooccurrence, eigensystems analysis, and Principal Components Analysis. The extent of similarity between the cognitive spaces and the information spaces, which were derived independently from each other, is measured. A strong similarity between the information spaces and the cognitive spaces are found, indicating that the methods described may have good utility for working towards information systems that operate as exosomatic memories.