Knowledge Organization System
| Collection | GlossariumBITri |
|---|---|
| Author | Jorge Morato-Lara Sonia Sánchez-Cuadrado |
| Editor | Sonia Sánchez-Cuadrado |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Number | 1 |
| ID | 65 |
| Object type | Concpet |
| Domain | Information Science |
| es | sistemanas de organización del conocimiento |
| fr | Systèmes de organisation de la connaissances |
| de | WissensOrganisation Systeme |
The concept Knowledge Organization System (aka KOS) group different classification schemes used to organize knowledge. Some KOSs are library classifications, taxonomies, subject headings, thesauri, ontologies, etc. KOS is a corner stone in Knowledge Organization tools.
Knowledge Organization techniques are used to build KOSs. These techniques outline principles to build, manage, and visualize KOS. Knowledge Organization Systems show a simplified view of the concepts of a domain. The goal is provide a way to improve the understanding and the management of a field of knowledge.
On account of the variety of disciplines needs to facilitate their understanding, KO Systems are present in a wide range of fields of knowledge. There are examples of KOS in e-learning, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, and Information Science. Each of these fields gives to KO Systems one or more different names, and design these KOS in a different way, according its specific goals. In this manner, e-learning talks about mind maps and concept maps; Artificial Intelligence address ontologies and semantic networks; Software Engineering talks about UML diagrams; and Information Science use thesauri, subject headings, library classifications, etc. Although, each approach has different semantic structures depending on its goals, all of them collect a domain vocabulary to represent concepts, and semantic relationships among these concepts.
The construction of a KOS requires a high intellectual effort to reach an agreement about the representation. This implies to analyze the domain to extract the main concepts and relationships and to agree these analyses in order to show a shared representation. This is a laborious and exhausting work with frequent delays. These problems might be minimized with a systematic methodology to develop these models. Examples came from Software Engineering and Ontology Engineering. Several software applications have been implemented to easy these tasks.
One of the main bottlenecks is knowledge acquisition. This phase tries to identify the main concepts, by different information sources and experts. Next step, it is conceptualization, that is structure the domain. This implies analyze terminology, synonyms, hierarchical, and associative structures. Besides these structures it is important to identify the constraints that present each relation or attribute.
Some approaches have been made to group different KOSs. In this regard and from the ontology engineering point of view, thesauri and other library classification are called light ontologies, in contrast to true ontologies (Daconta et al., 2003; 157; Lassila, O. y McGuinness, D. L., 2001; Gruninger y Uschold, 2002).
References
- ZENG, M.L. & CHAN, L.M. (2004). Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (5), pp. 377-395.
- LASSILA, Ora y MCGUINNESS, Deborah (2009). The Role of Frame-Based Representation on the Semantic Web. KSL Tech Report Number KSL-01-02. <http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/etai/lassila-mcguinness-fbr-sw.html>[28/09/2009]
- GRUNINGER, M. y USCHOLD, M. (2002). Ontologies and Semantic Integration to appear in Software Agents for the Warfighter, the first in a series of reports sponsored by the US Government Information Technology Assessment Consortium (ITAC). Edited by Jeff Bradshaw, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), University of West Florida.
- DACONTA, Michael C.; OBRST, Leo J. y SMITH, Kevin T. (2003).The Semantic Web. A guide to the future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management. Indianapolis: Wiley.