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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the understanding of industrial safety signs and messages by registered and non‐registered safety officers in Hong Kong with ten different user factors, and examine the relationship between cognitive sign features and sign comprehensibility.

The research methodology includes the survey development and appropriate statistical analyses. In total, 92 Hong Kong Chinese participated voluntarily in the study. A questionnaire survey was used to collect information about demographics, personal experience on safety and health issues, experience of reviewing safety sign information, comprehension scores, and the ratings of sign features for 30 industrial safety signs used in Hong Kong. The effect of ten user factors on sign understanding for the design of highly usable safety signs was examined.

Of the ten factors tested, only the factor of possession of registered safety officer (RSO) status was a significant predictor of comprehension performance. As expected, comprehension scores varied with the cognitive sign features of familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, and meaningfulness.

The currently used industrial safety signs should be redesigned as soon as possible, with careful consideration of cognitive sign features. To make the results more generally applicable, further research is needed to collect more data, particularly from females.

This research suggests that an effective education program for promoting the intended messages of industrial safety signs in various industries and work environments should be conducted as soon as possible. Safety officers, especially those who work in the construction industry need to play a more prominent role in ensuring workplace safety, and in transferring safety knowledge to the workers.

There is a need to enhance RSOs' risk perception and to increase awareness of the importance of safety signs through training programs, so as to improve workplace safety and organizational safety culture. The redesigned safety signs need to be launched with a public education program.

The paper's findings emphasize the need to create awareness of the importance of industrial safety and promote understanding of safety sign meanings amongst people in their work environments. Useful information for the design and use of safety signs was generated.

This article is a contribution to the development of a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of LIS in the hope of giving a more precise evaluation of its current problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary framework for lis, especially information retrieval (IR), in a way that goes beyond the cognitivist ‘information processing paradigm’. The main problem of this paradigm is that its concept of information and language does not deal in a systematic way with how social and cultural dynamics set the contexts that determine the meaning of those signs and words that are the basic tools for the organisation and retrieving of documents in LIS. The paradigm does not distinguish clearly enough between how the computer manipulates signs and how librarians work with meaning in practice when they design and run document mediating systems. The ‘cognitive viewpoint’ of Ingwersen and Belkin makes clear that information is not objective, but rather only potential, until it is interpreted by an individual mind with its own internal mental world view and purposes. It facilitates further study of the social pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of concepts. This approach is not yet fully developed. The domain analytic paradigm of Hjørland and Albrechtsen is a conceptual realisation of an important aspect of this area. In the present paper we make a further development of a non‐reductionistic and interdisciplinary view of information and human social communication by texts in the light of second‐order cybernetics, where information is seen as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ for a living autopoietic (self‐organised, self‐creating) system. Other key ideas are from the semiotics of Peirce and also Warner. This is the understanding of signs as a triadic relation between an object, a representation and an interpretant. Information is the interpretation of signs by living, feeling, self‐organising, biological, psychological and social systems. Signification is created and con‐trolled in a cybernetic way within social systems and is communicated through what Luhmann calls generalised media, such as science and art. The modern socio‐linguistic concept ‘discourse communities’ and Wittgenstein's ‘language game’ concept give a further pragmatic description of the self‐organising system's dynamic that determines the meaning of words in a social context. As Blair and Liebenau and Backhouse point out in their work it is these semantic fields of signification that are the true pragmatic tools of knowledge organ‐isation and document retrieval. Methodologically they are the first systems to be analysed when designing document mediating systems as they set the context for the meaning of concepts. Several practical and analytical methods from linguistics and the sociology of knowledge can be used in combination with standard methodology to reveal the significant language games behind document mediation.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a brand imitation strategy for the package design of male-targeted, female-targeted and gender-neutral products.

Three (2 × 2 × 2) between-subjects factorial experiments were conducted with three independent variables, namely, visual shape, color and logo, each classified as relevant/divergent. The dependent variables were participants’ attitudes toward the brand, attitudes toward the product and purchase intention.

There were no significant main effects or interactions for the male-targeted product. The results for the female-targeted product revealed no significant main effect of visual shape, a significant main effect of color and significant two-way interactions between visual shape and color and between visual shape and logo. Significant main effects were found for visual shape and color for the gender-neutral product.

A color scheme similar to that of a leading brand in the same product category more powerfully influenced participants’ attitudes and purchase intention, while a more holistically similar design had greater impact than a less holistic design. Some “divergence” or distinctive design elements of the female-targeted product positively influenced participants’ attitudes and behavior. These findings suggest that a brand imitation strategy offers a means for competing in the marketplace, but should be used with caution.

A conceptual continuum of brand imitation is proposed, incorporating visual semiotics, creativity theory and gender differences in cognitive styles to provide a more systematic method for delineating brand imitation levels.

Projects have high stakes in how they are categorized. The final place of a project within a classification scheme depends on the inclusion or exclusion of certain classification criteria. So far, many researchers and organizations have used a variety classification criteria to construct different project classification schemes. However, most of these classification criteria have been taken for granted and the process of selecting them to categorize projects still remains a black box. The purpose of this paper is to open the black box of classification process and explain how it is reflected in picking the classification criteria.

Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology’s literature, the authors examine the main views of classification process to provide insight into the unknown or implicit reasons that one might have to pick particular attributes as project classification criteria.

The authors argue that classification occurs in the eye of the beholder; it is not only the project’s features per se but also the classifier’s “goals, ideal and preference” or “knowledge of causal relations” that are reflected in the classification criteria.

By elaborating the classification process, the authors brought the project context into the big picture of classification and provide a more rational, and coherent picture of how project classification works. This contributes to a theoretical blind spot, raised by prior researchers, related to the selection of project classification criteria.

Understanding classification processes will reduce the ambiguities, inconsistencies and multiple interpretations of project categories and help practitioners increase their projects’ visibility and legitimacy within an already established classification scheme. These implications help organizations in addressing some of the main obstacles to using categorization in project management practice.

The review of prior work in the category research literature and the insights from this paper will provide project management scholars with a useful toolbox for future research on project classification, which has long been understudied.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the basics of semiotic analysis and concept theory that represent two dominant approaches to knowledge representation, and explore how these approaches are fruitful for knowledge organization.

In particular the semiotic theory formulated by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce and the concept theory formulated by Ingetraut Dahlberg are investigated. The paper compares the differences and similarities between these two theories of knowledge representation.

The semiotic model is a general and unrestricted model of signs and Dahlberg's model is thought from the perspective and demand of better knowledge organization system (KOS) development. It is found that Dahlberg's concept model provides a detailed method for analyzing and representing concepts in a KOS, where semiotics provides the philosophical context for representation.

This paper is the first to combine theories of knowledge representation, semiotic and concept theory, within the context of knowledge organization.

This study investigated the design of three online public library catalogs in light of the cognitive ability and success of children ages five to eight.

A quasi-experimental approach was employed to examine the influence of system design on children’s searching strategies and search success. Interviews were used to explore children’s rationale for using icons and taxonomies in the catalogs. Fifty one children from one public library participated in this study. Inferential statistics were utilized to whether significant differences existed between use of the catalogs and the children’s success in finding information.

Use of images and text were helpful in searching the catalogs. Results of the ANOVA test indicated no significant difference among children’s searching success rates and the three catalogs. Additionally, the participants misidentified representations used in icons in all three catalogs and created valid search paths that did not produce results. There was a disconnect between the children’s cognitive abilities and the design representations of the three catalogs.

The study took place in one location, thus one should not overgeneralize the findings. Use of assigned tasks may have affected children’s success rates. Children’s searching using printed cards of display screens from the three catalogs instead of real-time interaction with them is also a limitation.

Because of the children’s reliance on images, the choice of visual representations is crucial to successful searching. Interface designers should involve young users in the design of today’s online catalogs. They should also consider new forms of representations such as auditory icons, verbal mouse overs, and zooms.

In addition to addressing the need for research on young children’s information seeking and use of online catalogs in public libraries, this research focuses on the need for an additional layer of visual representation and highlights flaws in currently used catalog designs.