Data Mining in Information Science Research: Challenges And Opportunities

The terms data mining, data science, machine learning have invaded not only newspaper headlines and social media but have also appeared more frequently in scientific journals. The propagated advances of Artificial Intelligence have opened the debate on ethical issues of the use of these technologies in everyday life and also in scientific practice itself. Thus, the initial question that arises is: how are the social sciences and the humanities adopting these new techniques? And, in particular, how can Information Science contribute to the epistemological understanding of these new areas of knowledge without falling into a merely commercial narrative or a "revolutionary" discourse of how society will be "transformed" by the use of such technologies? Through literature review and exploratory research, this essay sought to analyze how the Information Science has used data mining techniques and whether the field can make important contributions to the use of Data Mining both from an epistemological point of view and also in its practical uses specifically in the area of knowledge organization systems.