Knowledge organization

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 that serve to provide systems of representation and order for knowledge and information objects. It addresses the 'activities carried out and tools used by people who work in places that accumulate information resources (e.g., books, maps, documents, datasets, images) for the use of humankind, both immediately and for posterity. It discusses the processes that are in place to make resources findable, whether someone is searching for a single known item or is browsing through hundreds of resources just hoping to discover something useful. Information organization supports a myriad of information-seeking scenarios.' Traditional human-based approaches performed by librarians, archivists, and subject specialists are increasingly challenged by computational (big data) algorithmic techniques. KO as a field of study is concerned with the nature and quality of such knowledge organizing processes (KOP) (such as taxonomy and ontology) as well as the resulting knowledge organizing systems (KOS). 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 that serve to provide systems of representation and order for knowledge and information objects. It addresses the 'activities carried out and tools used by people who work in places that accumulate information resources (e.g., books, maps, documents, datasets, images) for the use of humankind, both immediately and for posterity. It discusses the processes that are in place to make resources findable, whether someone is searching for a single known item or is browsing through hundreds of resources just hoping to discover something useful. Information organization supports a myriad of information-seeking scenarios.' Traditional human-based approaches performed by librarians, archivists, and subject specialists are increasingly challenged by computational (big data) algorithmic techniques. KO as a field of study is concerned with the nature and quality of such knowledge organizing processes (KOP) (such as taxonomy and ontology) as well as the resulting knowledge organizing systems (KOS). Divergent historical and theoretical approaches towards organizing knowledge are based on different views of knowledge, cognition, language, and social organization. This richness lends itself to many complementary ways to consider knowledge organization. The academic International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) engages with these issues via the research journal Knowledge Organization. One widely used analysis of organizational principles summarizes them as Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy (LATCH). Among the major figures in the history of KO are Melvil Dewey (1851–1931) and Henry Bliss (1870–1955).