Corporate KOS
(Knowledge Organizing Systems)
Corporate KOS such as thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies are systems designed
for a specific firm or organization in contrast to systems designed to serve
users in a domain scattered in many companies.
People within an organization typically use many different systems. A
pharmacological company, for example, may use the systems associated with the
MEDLINE and the Chemical Abstracts databases. Schools of Library and
Information Science (LIS) may use the ASIST thesaurus in addition to tools
in computer science, management and cultural studies. A corporate thesaurus is
thus a mixture of terminology in different domains.
A
corporate thesaurus for The Royal School of LIS in Copenhagen would have
to include terms in Library and Information Science, Computer Science, Cultural
Studies, Management, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, etc. For researchers
in, say, bibliometrics, it would probably not be able to compete with
specialized subject tools developed for that specific domain.
Literature:
Gilchrist, A. (2001). Corporate taxonomies: report on a survey of current practice
Nielsen, M L (2002). The word association method - a gateway to work-task based
retrieval. Åbo : Åbo Akademi University Press. Doctoral dissertation. Available
at:
http://www2.db.dk/mln/TheWordAssociationMethod/Opslag.htm
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 18-01-2006