Digital Dictionary

K

Knowledge Organization

Widad Mustafa El Hadi

GERiiCO, Université de Lille, France

Knowledge organization in the digital age

Definition of the open field

Interest in the problems of knowledge organization (KO) has increased significantly in the face of the major, strategic issues that knowledge represents in the digital era. It has an autonomous field of activity, of study and research within the vast territory covered by the information sciences. Described as a field of study and practice concerned with the design, examination and critique of processes for organizing and representing documents, it covers a set of concepts, methods and tools for representing and organizing human knowledge for storage, use and sharing. Its role is to produce a common standardized language. KO is therefore a key element of the infrastructures that organize access to heterogeneous documents (publications, images, sounds, etc.). The set of means it provides (classifications, documentary languages, thesauri, ontologies, etc.) is the equivalent for content of what are the communication protocols between networked machines.

Historical approaches

Although it can take many forms, the process of organization almost always involves a classification operation. Classification is certainly one of the most refined methods of segmenting reality, putting it in order and producing frames of reference. Classification is also inherent in the process of definition, which consists of determining both what ...