The importance of knowledge organization

Abstract

EDITOR'S SUMMARYKnowledge organization systems (KOS) are ubiquitous and helpful, but from an economist's perspective their value and contribution to economic productivity are hard to quantify. Though estimating the aggregate impact of KOS is a challenge, it is possible to enhance that impact through the use of a shared or interoperable controlled vocabulary with rules for interpreting text. Like RDF triplets underlying the Semantic Web, elements can be identified to represent phenomena, relationships and properties, and then combined using a synthetic approach to generate complex concepts. Such a vocabulary would be enhanced with related concept information, expanding a user's discovery through a web of hierarchical and associative relationships. The vocabulary would be interdisciplinary and applicable to any database, geared to building upon simple expressions for generic phenomena. The KOS could serve as a universal thesaurus complementing the combinable elements used to classify content with the potential to be a landmark classification system.