Knowledge organization (KO), organization of knowledge, organization of information, or information organization is an intellectual discipline concerned with activities such as
document description,
indexing, and
classification Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood.
Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes.
It may also refer to:
Business, organizat ...
that serve to provide systems of representation and order for knowledge and information objects. According to ''The Organization of Information'' by Joudrey and Taylor, information organization:
Issues related to knowledge sharing can be said to have been an important part of knowledge management for a long time. Knowledge sharing has received a lot of attention in research and business practice both within and outside organizations and its different levels.
Sharing knowledge is not only about giving it to others, but it also includes searching, locating, and absorbing knowledge. Unawareness of the employees’ works and duties tend to provoke the repetition of mistakes, the waste of resources, and duplicating the same projects. It is important to motivate co-workers to share their knowledge. This concept is called knowledge enabling. It leads to trust among the individuals from an association and encourages a more open and proactive relationship that grants the trade of information easily.
Knowledge sharing is part of the three-phase knowledge management process which is a continuous process model. The three parts are knowledge creation, knowledge implementation, and knowledge sharing. The process is continuous, which is why the parts cannot be fully separated. Knowledge creation is the consequence of individuals’ minds, interactions, and activities. Developing new ideas and arrangements allude to the process of knowledge creation. Using the knowledge which is present at the company in the most effective manner stands for the implementation of knowledge. Knowledge sharing, the most essential part of the process for our topic, takes place when two or more people benefit by learning from each other.
Traditional human-based approaches performed by librarians, archivists, and subject specialists are increasingly challenged by computational (
big data
Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...
) algorithmic techniques. KO as a field of study is concerned with the nature and quality of such knowledge-organizing processes (KOP) (such as
taxonomy
Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification.
A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...
and
ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
) as well as the resulting
knowledge organizing systems (KOS).
Theoretical approaches
Traditional approaches
Among the major figures in the history of KO are
Melvil Dewey
Melville Louis Kossuth "Melvil" Dewey (December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931) was an influential American librarian and educator, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, a founder of the Lake Placid Club, and a chief lib ...
(1851–1931) and
Henry Bliss (1870–1955).
Dewey's goal was an efficient way to manage library collections; not an optimal system to support users of libraries. His system was meant to be used in many libraries as a standardized way to manage collections. The first version of this system was created in 1876.
An important characteristic in Henry Bliss' (and many contemporary thinkers of KO) was that the sciences tend to reflect the order of Nature and that library classification should reflect the order of knowledge as uncovered by science:
Natural order →
Scientific classification
Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification.
A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...
→ Library classification (KO)
The implication is that librarians, in order to classify books, should know about scientific developments. This should also be reflected in their education:
Among the other principles, which may be attributed to the traditional approach to KO are:
* Principle of
controlled vocabulary
Control may refer to:
Basic meanings Economics and business
* Control (management), an element of management
* Control, an element of management accounting
* Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization
* Controlling ...
*
Cutter's rule about specificity
* Hulme's principle of literary warrant (1911)
* Principle of organizing from the general to the specific
Today, after more than 100 years of research and development in LIS, the "traditional" approach still has a strong position in KO and in many ways its principles still dominate.
Facet analytic approaches
The date of the foundation of this approach may be chosen as the publication of
S. R. Ranganathan
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan ( 9 August 1892 – 27 September 1972) was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major fa ...
's
colon classification in 1933. The approach has been further developed by, in particular, the British
Classification Research Group The Classification Research Group (CRG) was a significant contributor to classification research and theory in the field of library and information science in the latter half of the 20th century. It was formed in England in 1952 and was active until ...
.
The best way to explain this approach is probably to explain its analytico-synthetic methodology. The meaning of the term "analysis" is: breaking down each subject into its basic concepts. The meaning of the term synthesis is: combining the relevant units and concepts to describe the subject matter of the information package in hand.
Given subjects (as they appear in, for example, book titles) are first analyzed into a few common categories, which are termed "facets". Ranganathan proposed his PMEST formula: Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time:
* ''Personality'' is the distinguishing characteristic of a subject.
* ''Matter'' is the physical material of which a subject may be composed.
* ''Energy'' is any action that occurs with respect to the subject.
* ''Space'' is the geographic component of the location of a subject.
* ''Time'' is the period associated with a subject.
The information retrieval tradition (IR)
Important in the IR-tradition have been, among others, the
Cranfield experiments
The Cranfield experiments were a series of experimental studies in information retrieval conducted by Cyril W. Cleverdon at the College of Aeronautics, today known as Cranfield University, in the 1960s to evaluate the efficiency of indexing syste ...
, which were founded in the 1950s, and the TREC experiments (
Text Retrieval Conference
The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an ongoing series of workshops focusing on a list of different information retrieval (IR) research areas, or ''tracks.'' It is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) an ...
s) starting in 1992. It was the Cranfield experiments, which introduced the measures
"recall" and "precision" as evaluation criteria for systems efficiency. The Cranfield experiments found that classification systems like UDC and facet-analytic systems were less efficient compared to free-text searches or low level indexing systems ("UNITERM"). The Cranfield I test found, according to Ellis (1996, 3–6) the following results:
Although these results have been criticized and questioned, the IR-tradition became much more influential while library classification research lost influence. The dominant trend has been to regard only
statistical averages. What has largely been neglected is to ask: Are there certain kinds of questions in relation to which other kinds of representation, for example, controlled vocabularies, may improve recall and precision?
User-oriented and cognitive views
The best way to define this approach is probably by method: Systems based upon user-oriented approaches must specify how the design of a system is made on the basis of empirical studies of users.
User studies demonstrated very early that users prefer verbal search systems as opposed to systems based on classification notations. This is one example of a principle derived from empirical studies of users. Adherents of classification notations may, of course, still have an argument: That notations are well-defined and that users may miss important information by not considering them.
Folksonomies is a recent kind of KO based on users' rather than on librarians' or subject specialists' indexing.
Bibliometric approaches
These approaches are primarily based on using bibliographical references to organize networks of papers, mainly by bibliographic coupling (introduced by Kessler 1963) or co-citation analysis ( independently suggested by Marshakova 1973 and Small 1973). In recent years it has become a popular activity to construe bibliometric maps as structures of research fields.
Two considerations are important in considering bibliometric approaches to KO:
# The level of indexing depth is partly determined by the number of terms assigned to each document. In citation indexing this corresponds to the number of references in a given paper. On the average, scientific papers contain 10–15 references, which provide quite a high level of depth.
# The references, which function as access points, are provided by the highest subject-expertise: The experts writing in the leading journals. This expertise is much higher than that which library catalogs or bibliographical databases typically are able to draw on.
The domain analytic approach
Domain analysis is a
sociological
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and ...
-
epistemological
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
standpoint that advocates that the indexing of a given document should reflect the needs of a given group of users or a given ideal purpose. In other words, any description or representation of a given document is more or less suited to the fulfillment of certain tasks. A description is never objective or neutral, and the goal is not to standardize descriptions or make one description once and for all for different target groups.
The development of the Danish library "
KVINFO
The Danish Center for Research on Women and Gender (KVINFO) is a Danish information center about women's issues. It primarily aims to provide the general public with information about the results of women's studies and gender research undertak ...
" may serve as an example that explains the domain-analytic point of view.
KVINFO was founded by the librarian and writer
Nynne Koch Anna Lise (Nynne) Koch (1915–2001) was a Danish feminist, writer and a pioneering researcher in gender studies. After publishing novels in the 1950s, she joined the Royal Danish Library in 1961 where she paved the way for establishing Kvinfo, t ...
and its history goes back to 1965. Nynne Koch was employed at the Royal Library in Copenhagen in a position without influence on book selection. She was interested in women's studies and began personally to collect printed catalog cards of books in the Royal Library, which were considered relevant for women's studies. She developed a classification system for this subject. Later she became the head of KVINFO and got a budget for buying books and journals, and still later, KVINFO became an independent library. The important theoretical point of view is that the Royal Library had an official systematic catalog of a high standard. Normally it is assumed that such a catalog is able to identify relevant books for users whatever their theoretical orientation. This example demonstrates, however, that for a specific user group (feminist scholars), an alternative way of organizing catalog cards was important. In other words: Different points of view need different systems of organization.
Domain analysis has examined epistemological issues in the field, i.e. comparing the assumptions made in different approaches to KO and examining the questions regarding subjectivity and objectivity in KO. Subjectivity is not just about individual differences. Such differences are of minor interest because they cannot be used as guidelines for KO. What seems important are collective views shared by many users. A kind of subjectivity about many users is related to philosophical positions. In any field of knowledge different views are always at play. In arts, for example, different views of art are always present. Such views determine views on art works, writing on art works, how art works are organized in exhibitions and how writings on art are organized in libraries. In general it can be stated that different philosophical positions on any issue have implications for relevance criteria, information needs and for criteria of organizing knowledge.
Other approaches
One widely used analysis of information-organizational principles, attributed to
Richard Saul Wurman
Richard Saul Wurman (born March 26, 1935) is an American architect and graphic designer. Wurman has written, designed, and published 90 books and created the TED.com, TED conferences, the EG Conference, TEDMED, and the WWW Conference.
Education ...
, summarizes them as Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy (LATCH).
See also
*
Automatic document classification
Document classification or document categorization is a problem in library science, information science and computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. This may be done "manually" (or "intellectuall ...
*
Body of knowledge
A body of knowledge (BOK or BoK) is the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain, as defined by the relevant learned society or professional association.Oliver, G.R. (2012). ''Foundations of the Assumed Bus ...
*
Classification (general theory)
The term classification can apply to one or all of:
* the process of classifying (distinguishing and distributing kinds of "things" into different groups)
* a resulting set of classes (also called "a classification system")
* the assignment of el ...
*
Dewey decimal classification
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), colloquially known as the Dewey Decimal System, is a proprietary library classification system which allows new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject.
Section 4.1 ...
*
Discipline (academia)
*
Document classification
Document classification or document categorization is a problem in library science, information science and computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. This may be done "manually" (or "intellectually") ...
*
Growth of knowledge In Karl Popper's philosophy, the main problem of methodology and philosophy of science is to explain and promote the growth of knowledge. To this purpose, Popper advocated his theory of falsifiability, testability and testing. He wrote in ''The Lo ...
*
Information ecology Information ecology is the application of ecological concepts for modeling the information society. It considers the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment. "Information ecology" of ...
*
Knowledge organization systems Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), concept system or concept scheme is a generic term used in knowledge organization for authority files, classification schemes, thesaurus (information retrieval), thesauri, topic maps, Ontology (information scien ...
*
Knowledge representation and reasoning
Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as Computer-aided diag ...
*
Library and information science
Library and information science(s) or studies (LIS) is an interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical (e.g. art, legal proceedings, e ...
*
Library classification
A library classification is a system of organization of knowledge by which library resources are arranged and ordered systematically. Library classifications are a notational system that represents the order of topics in the classification and al ...
*
List of academic fields
*
Outline of academic disciplines
An academic discipline or field of study is a branch of knowledge, taught and researched as part of higher education. A scholar's discipline is commonly defined by the university faculties and learned societies to which they belong and the ac ...
*
Personal information management
Personal information management (PIM) is the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages, and email mes ...
References
{{Authority control
Epistemology
Information science
Information science by discipline
Organization
An organization or organisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is an entity—such as a company, an institution, or an association—comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose.
The word is derived from ...
Library cataloging and classification
Library science