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EDITORIAL Knowledge
organization:
The fall and rise of knowledge new dimensions
organization: new dimensions of
349
subject description and retrieval
Received 20 January 2010
Vanda Broughton Revised 14 May 2010
Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK Accepted 28 May 2010

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the selected Proceedings of the 1st National
Conference of ISKO UK, the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization. It
aims to provide some background for the group, and place it within the context of the recent history of
information organization and retrieval in subject domains.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper introduces a selection of papers delivered at the 1st
National Conference of the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization.
Findings – The field of knowledge organization is lively and progressive, and researchers and
practitioners in many sectors are actively engaged with it, despite its apparent decline in LIS
education. New communities of interest may use different terms to describe this work, but there is
much common ground, and a growing convergence of ideas and methods.
Originality/value – The value of existing theory is now more widely recognised, and the importance
of structured knowledge organization systems and vocabularies in retrieval is generally
acknowledged. It is to be hoped that these important areas of information practice and research
will soon be restored to their former place in professional education.
Keywords Knowledge management, Information retrieval, Multimedia
Paper type General review

Introduction
These papers constitute a selection of those delivered at the first national conference of
the UK chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The
conference, “Content architecture: exploiting and managing diverse resources”, was
held at University College London in June 2009, and came as the culmination of two
years effort in establishing and consolidating the UK group.
ISKO, as an international association for practitioners and researchers in the field of
classification and concept analysis, was formally instituted in 1989, but can trace its
roots to the foundation in 1973 of the journal International Classification by Ingetraut
Dahlberg, first president of ISKO. In 1989 this became the official organ of ISKO, the
title being changed to Knowledge Organization in 1993. Today the journal describes
itself as “the international journal for concept theory, classification, indexing, and
knowledge representation”, and this is also the broad remit of ISKO itself. Essentially Aslib Proceedings: New Information
an interdisciplinary association, members come from the fields of library and Perspectives
Vol. 62 No. 4/5, 2010
information science, computer science, philosophy, linguistics and informatics, and are pp. 349-354
occupied with the study and development of knowledge organization systems from q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0001-253X
both a conceptual and technical point of view (ISKO, 2010). DOI 10.1108/00012531011074618
AP The UK chapter (ISKO UK) came into being at an informal meeting at the Library
62,4/5 School (now Department of Information Studies) at University College London in
March 2007, and formed part of a wave of new national groups originating in that
period. The success of ISKO UK has surprised and delighted us all, and its expansion
from an original seven members in March 2007 to its current membership of around 60
has been steady and sustained. A possible reason for the popularity of the new group is
350 the lack otherwise of a UK research or professional interest group in the field of
knowledge organization and retrieval, a gap which is not entirely filled by either
CILIP’s Cataloguing and Indexing Group, nor the British Computer Society.
ISKO UK has therefore provided a natural home, not only for practitioners and
academics in conventional LIS, but also taxonomists, intranet managers, indexers and
content managers; it has attracted an even wider audience to its events, with archivists,
records managers, systems managers, computer scientists, and academics in a number
of fields all being represented. A significant contingent is that of members of the
former Institute of Information Scientists who have not necessarily found themselves
well catered for by CILIP. A feature, too, is the representation of a very wide range of
information sectors: academic libraries, special libraries, the corporate sector,
government departments, museums and art galleries, the voluntary sector, and
generic information organizations of all kinds. The interaction between researchers
and academics and practitioners in the commercial world is unusual, and particularly
to be valued, and the KOKO (“Konnecting kommunities”) events are specifically
designed to foster this cross-fertilisation. It has also encouraged the participation of
commercial developers as well as consumers, giving further insight into the differences
and similarities between theory and application.

The enduring value of knowledge organization theory

The success of ISKO UK also belies the commonly held belief that there is no interest in
subject access, organization or retrieval in an age when so much data handling can be
carried out automatically, and that expertise in the organization of information does
not matter very much anymore. This is very apparent in the library and information
science field, and the disappearance of traditional classification and subject
cataloguing from library school curricula, together with cognate skills such as
indexing, abstracting and subject analysis, is well documented, as are the resulting
concerns of the profession. The downward trend in the place of classification in the
curriculum was noted as long ago as 1965 (Mills, 1965), and during the last five years a
number of papers have identified and lamented the lack of proper professional
education in these skills. Davis (2008), in a survey of 47 American library schools,
found that, although most provided a general option in cataloguing, only ten offered
any education in subject analysis, that is the identification of subject content, and
application of classification schemes and subject headings. Bowman (2006) describes a
very similar situation in British library schools, where “cataloguing and classification
have become largely invisible in professional education” (Bowman, 2006, p. 309), and
where the discipline is disguised under a variety of other, more acceptable names. In
addition, the treatment may be very superficial with little practical content. The
inevitable outcome is a generation that lacks formal training in the design and
application of subject retrieval tools. The effects of this on professional practice is
noted by Elrod (2008) who identifies a lack of expertise among cataloguers, and a
consequent decline in the quality of bibliographic records, even in those generated by Knowledge
the Library Congress and regarded as models of their kind (Elrod, 2008, p. 5). organization:
But it is clear that the need for effective organization and retrieval of material on a
subject basis has not gone away. If librarians and information scientists no longer new dimensions
address the problem, then others have done so, even if their use of an alternative
vocabulary to describe their activities, and their lack of awareness of the canons of
classification theory tend to obscure the common ground. Since the advent of the world 351
wide web and the spread of digital dissemination, much innovative work has been
carried out by computer scientists and information technologists, at first largely
independently of the information professions. A seminal note from Soergel (1999)
stresses the continuing importance of ontological and lexical structures in
underpinning scientific and scholarly endeavour, but deplores the lack of rigour in
their construction, and the lack of consistency in the principles and methodology used.
He recommends greater cooperation between disciplines, and more involvement of
those with expertise in traditional theory:
The vast body of knowledge on classification structure and on ways to display classifications
developed around library classification and in information science more generally, and the
huge intellectual capital embodied in many classification schemes [and] thesauri is largely
ignored. Large and useful systems are being built with more effort than necessary (Soergel,
1999, p. 1120).
There were many other calls at that time for the dissemination of the theoretical
principles of classification to a wider audience, and some demonstrations of how they
might be applied in an online environment (Wheatley, 2000). The multiplicity of new
names for knowledge organization systems is also investigated by Gilchrist (2003), and
he reinforces Soergel’s call for co-operation between sectors, “if such dreams as the
Semantic Web are to become reality” (Gilchrist, 2003, p. 16). He does, however, see more
commonality in the approach, and this is perhaps indicative of an evolving relationship
between information science and information technology:
Taxonomies use both classification and thesaurus techniques, and it is interesting to note
how similar are some of the techniques used in automatic indexing and in automatic
categorization (Gilchrist, 2003, p. 16).
He also notes the extent to which online tools exhibit enhanced features when
compared to the traditional terminology tool, and that structures and relationships are
often embedded in the software rather than being apparent in the interface (Gilchrist,
2003, p. 16), so that the theoretical basis is implicit rather than explicit.
Today a greater degree of convergence between LIS and other disciplines can be
observed, and there are clear indications of the extent to which researchers and
developers have already been influenced by the rich body of work generated by earlier
LIS theorists (Broughton, 2006). Automation might facilitate the speedy import and
export of data, but the structures within which this is done now owe much to the
principles developed from the mid-twentieth century onwards. As a consequence,
much of the recent research into automatic classification and indexing comes to the
conclusion that the integration of semantic tools, such as structured vocabularies and
ontologies, is effective in improving the performance of machine driven systems.
If the current manifestations of knowledge organization systems continue to suffer
from a degree of fragmentation, and the lack of a shared language of discourse, it is still
AP a lively and challenging domain. A real engagement with the intellectual and
62,4/5 conceptual aspects of information organization is very evident, both at the
philosophical level, and in the design of tools, and there is more coming together of
the various interested parties. The ongoing programme of ISKO UK events has
demonstrated this very clearly, with considerable interest in areas such as semantic
analysis technology, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems), and linked
352 data; the presentation and discussion of semantic web issues have shown
cross-fertilisation to be vital to progress.

The ISKO UK conference

The conference was the most ambitious event held in ISKO UK’s first two years of
operation and its programme reflects the breadth of interest of the ISKO UK
community. That richness is also reflected in the range and diversity of papers
presented here, and the significance of the chapter is demonstrated in the number of
international delegates and of overseas contributors.
The conference itself covered a tremendous range of topics (ISKO UK, 2009). The
problems of knowledge organization were considered for a number of resource types
including music, still images, grey literature, oral history, museum artefacts, datasets,
and abstracts, and for such diverse subjects as archaeology, cinema, aquatic science,
local history, pharmacology, medicine, biodiversity, cultural heritage, and architecture.
The roles of traditional tools such as the thesaurus and the faceted classification in the
digital context were discussed alongside new technologies of grid computing, data in
the cloud, and content based image retrieval, and web 2.0 activities like social tagging.
Cognate fields provided examples of linguistic semantics and natural language
processing, and mapping and interoperability were also significant themes. The
keynote talk by Clifford Lynch (not included here) provided a compelling overview of
new developments in e-dissemination, the concept of publishing and authoring, and the
rise of “citizen science”, also its cultural equivalent, “citizen humanities” and the part
played by crowd-sourcing in the digital curation of cultural resources.
Although not all presenters chose to submit a paper, abstracts are available from
the conference web site at www.iskouk.org/conf2009/programme.htm

The proceedings of the conference

The other keynote speaker, David Crystal, delivered a witty and insightful look at how
content analysis using linguistic techniques has developed from simple keyword
analysis to the more mature methodology of semantic targeting, a retrieval technique
developed for the world of advertising. Crystal explores the difference between these
notions, and describes current issues in the way semantic targeting is evolving,
including ways of handling site sensitivity, sentiment, intention, and cultural
localisation.
Against the background of this overview, other papers investigate knowledge
organization theories and tools in individual sectors, and for particular media. The
state-of-the-art in the library world is represented by Zeng and Zummer’s paper on
Functional Requirements of Subject Authority Data (FRSAD), which attempts to
establish criteria for subject description within the bibliographic record, while Milne’s
paper considers how records management classification techniques are applicable to
digital resource organization. A view from the commercial sector is provided by
Wagger, Park and Bedford with a discussion of the metadata models used in managing Knowledge
World Bank publications. organization:
Inevitably, several of the contributions address the organization of digital
collections in a more general way, including Boteram who discusses the theoretical new dimensions
basis of the model used in the RESEDA project at Cologne University, and presents the
core requirements for semantic interoperability. Interoperability is also the subject of
Libo Si, Ann O’Brien and Steve Probets’ research into cross-browsing and the use of 353
mappings in conjunction with middleware to facilitate resource discovery where
several indexing terminologies are employed.
The problems of a multilingual environment are the focus of Ménard’s paper on
image retrieval, which also looks at the relative effectiveness of controlled vocabularies
and free indexing using natural language. Automatic image processing forms part of
Town and Harrison’s research into large-scale grid computing as a mechanism for
content based image retrieval. This paper, one of the conference highlights, concludes
that the use of ontological tools improves overall effectiveness of retrieval. A similar
approach is demonstrated by Matthews, Jones, Puzoń, Golub, Moon, Tudhope and
Nielsen in their work on the combination of social tagging with a controlled vocabulary
to enhance metadata. Other techniques for the creation of metadata include Vachlidis,
Binding, Tudhope and May’s use of natural language processing techniques to extract
index terms from archaeological grey literature, and Ibekwe-SanJuan’s computational
linguistic analysis of Medline abstracts.
Finally, the analysis of descriptive metadata applied to music information sources
in Inskip, MacFarlane and Rafferty’s study of film music takes an apparently more
conventional approach to resource discovery, but discovers that the attributes to be
identified for music may differ radically from those of texts, and that the semiotics of
music presents some special challenges.

Conclusion
Despite rumours to the contrary the art of knowledge organization is alive and well,
and characterised by the vitality and diversity of work across a wide spectrum of
communities. These communities show evidence of an increasing tendency to
collaborate, and the combination of theories and techniques, of the intellectual and the
technological, seems to offer the brightest prospect of success. The value of existing
theory is now more widely recognised, and the importance of structured knowledge
organization systems and vocabularies in retrieval is generally acknowledged. And it
is to be hoped that these important areas of information practice and research will soon
be restored to their former place in professional education.

References
Bowman, J.H. (2006), “Education and training for cataloguing and classification in the British
Isles”, Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 309-33.
Broughton, V. (2006), “The need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of
information retrieval”, ASLIB Proceedings, Vol. 58 No. 1, pp. 49-72.
Davis, J.M. (2008), “A survey of cataloging education: are library schools listening?”, Cataloging
and Classification Quarterly, Vol. 46 No. 2, pp. 182-200.
Elrod, J.M.R. (2008), “The case for cataloguing education”, Serials Librarian, Vol. 55 No. 1,
pp. 1-10.
AP Gilchrist, A. (2003), “Thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies – an etymological note”, Journal of
Documentation, Vol. 59 No. 1, pp. 7-18.
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about.html (accessed 1 June 2010).
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architecture: exploiting and managing diverse resources”, available at: www.iskouk.org/
354 conf2009/programme.htm (accessed 1 June 2010).
Mills, J. (1965), “Using classification in teaching indexing”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 21
No. 4, pp. 279-86.
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American Society for Information Science, Vol. 50 No. 12, pp. 1119-20.
Wheatley, A. (2000), “Subject trees on the internet”, Journal of Internet Cataloging, Vol. 2 No. 3,
pp. 115-41.

Corresponding author
Vanda Broughton can be contacted at: v.broughton@ucl.ac.uk

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