Library and Information Science

The word “kansei” originally means “sensitivity” in Japanese. A somewhat different and expanded meaning of this word began to be used in Japan, at first in the area of marketing, in 1984. Gradually it had been used in various fields, and eventually became a buzzword of the 1980s. “Kansei” is an intentionally ambiguous word, meaning some ambiguous and illogical way of accepting sensible objects, something like “feeling”, “sensitivity”, and “impression” in English.

In 1990s, the concept of “kansei” was introduced to information retrieval research. Experiments with “kansei” keywords consisting of adjectives, have been carried out for the retrieval of pictures and music. Normally steps of constructing and retrieving a “kansei” database are as follows: (1) to assign “kansei” keywords to images manually, (2) to relate the “kansei” keywords thus assigned with the characteristics (ex. color) extracted from the images, (3) to create a database consisting of images, their characteristics and “kansei” keywords, (4) to retrieve images with “kansei” keywords

Many experiments have shown that such a method of creating databases achieves the optimal performance in small size databases. Thus, it will be most probable that it cannot be applied to operational databases.