Towards a Theory of Aboutness, Subject, Topicality, Theme, Domain, Field, Content . . . and Relevance

Theories of aboutness and theories of subject analysis and of related concepts such as topicality are often isolated from each other in the literature of information science (IS) and related disciplines. In IS it is important to consider the nature and meaning of these concepts, which is closely related to theoretical and metatheoretical issues in information retrieval (IR). A theory of IR must specify which concepts should be regarded as synonymous concepts and explain how the meaning of the nonsynonymous concepts should be defined.