to a lesser degree, specific organizations and "users" of the information technologies. Such research, according to Igbaria (1999), is inevitably fragmented and diverse; consequently, identification of the six most significant issues related to IS is difficult at best in the relatively early stages of discipline development.
Griffiths (2000) has suggested that there are at lest three important dimensions of information science which will require integration or "bridge-building" in the future. The first dimension involves the many disciplines that constitute IS, which have been more or less independent of one another, but which are essential to information science. Zwies (2000) agrees with this comment, noting that the very newness of the field has created fragmentation among its internal disciplines and mandated a new understanding of the manifold specialties and subspecialties that together create IS. Griffiths (2000) goes on to point out that there are as many as thirty to forty "disciplines of information" that, taken together constitute the field. These include such varied specialties as artificial intelligence, communications sciences and theory, computer science, cybermetrics and cybernetics, lexicology, linguistics (with subspecialties of phonetics, scientometrics, semantics, semiotics, and speech science), telecommunications, systemics, and system science.
While each of these disciplines, says Griffiths (2000), has in common a focus on the phenomenon of information as the object of research, education, and even practice, they still tend to have distinct cultures which function in relative isolation. An early study by Machlup and Mansfield (1983) indicated that such specialties tend to have their own languages that describe the same entities using different words. Consequently, what is critically needed in the field of IS is an integrated vocabulary or lexicon that will provide for the integration of each of th...