Knowledge Organization and the Disciplines of Information

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Information Processes".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2021) | Viewed by 9739

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Science and Technology Library, University of Pavia | UNIPV
Interests: knowledge organization; classification theory; facet analysis; information theory; theory of levels of reality; ontology; philosophy of science

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The open access journal Information, devoted to the study of information in both its technical and its semantic senses, consecrates a Special Issue to the research field of knowledge organization (KO). Though having especially developed from the theory of classification and subject indexing as part of library and information science (LIS), KO also has many connections to philosophy of science, linguistics, and computer science. The purpose of this Special Issue is to strengthen the potential links between these fields and to promote conceptual clarification about their relationships and boundaries.

Should KO be treated only as a subset of the LIS community concerned with enabling access to information resources, or can it reach the status of an independent research field that only partially overlaps with LIS? Can a general theory of KO be developed, also covering the classification of the sciences, taxonomic principles within every science, cognitive principles ruling navigation across information sources, conceptual organization of learning curricula, etc.? How can all this be connected with such other information disciplines as information architecture, human–computer interaction, knowledge engineering, cybernetics, systems theory, or the physico-mathematical notion of information?

These questions can be investigated by either conceptual papers or papers discussing the structure and application of specific knowledge organization systems (KOSs) in light of the perspective described above.

Dr. Claudio Gnoli
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • classification
  • information theory
  • library and information science (LIS)
  • knowledge organization systems (KOSs)
  • ontology
  • philosophy of science
  • subject access to information
  • taxonomy

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

25 pages, 1019 KiB  
Article
Information Retrieval and Knowledge Organization: A Perspective from the Philosophy of Science
by Birger Hjørland
Information 2021, 12(3), 135; https://doi.org/10.3390/info12030135 - 20 Mar 2021
Cited by 32 | Viewed by 8790
Abstract
Information retrieval (IR) is about making systems for finding documents or information. Knowledge organization (KO) is the field concerned with indexing, classification, and representing documents for IR, browsing, and related processes, whether performed by humans or computers. The field of IR is today [...] Read more.
Information retrieval (IR) is about making systems for finding documents or information. Knowledge organization (KO) is the field concerned with indexing, classification, and representing documents for IR, browsing, and related processes, whether performed by humans or computers. The field of IR is today dominated by search engines like Google. An important difference between KO and IR as research fields is that KO attempts to reflect knowledge as depicted by contemporary scholarship, in contrast to IR, which is based on, for example, “match” techniques, popularity measures or personalization principles. The classification of documents in KO mostly aims at reflecting the classification of knowledge in the sciences. Books about birds, for example, mostly reflect (or aim at reflecting) how birds are classified in ornithology. KO therefore requires access to the adequate subject knowledge; however, this is often characterized by disagreements. At the deepest layer, such disagreements are based on philosophical issues best characterized as “paradigms”. No IR technology and no system of knowledge organization can ever be neutral in relation to paradigmatic conflicts, and therefore such philosophical problems represent the basis for the study of IR and KO. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Organization and the Disciplines of Information)
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