Knowledge organization (KO), functions of

"The basic functions of KO in the context of LIS are:

Each of these functions may be met by the same KOS or by different KOS. Shelf-arrangement is a narrow function, which puts major constrains on a given system, why the most challenging functions are related to IR and document information. It is important that each of those functions be considered in their own right. Many advanced tools are able to facilitate IR far beyond the traditional systems constrained by their shelving purposes" (Broughton et al., 2005, pp. 1-3).  

 

It is important to realize that library catalogs and bibliographies compete with many other tools providing subject access to published documents, for example, bibliographical references in documents already obtained by the user, see, for example, East (2006) for some empirical data from philosophy. In the overall picture is the role of library catalogs in providing information about available literature rather limited. In the case of metadata on WebPages, some rather depressing results are reported by Hawking & Zobel (2007). Also concepts such as folksonomies challenges LIS-professionals role in KO.

 

The functions of KO may be more or less integrated with the functions of a library (or other systems, e.g. bibliographies). Miksa (1998, p. 76) writes:

 

"When modern library classification began in the nineteenth century, its purpose was intertwined with the educational and cultural objectives of the modern library movement. That movement took as its primary aim the cultivation of people's minds so as to produce citizens for an enlightened democracy. Within that ideological context, library classification had more than one role. On the other hand, it served  as a tool of education, instructing patrons over a period of time as to how knowledge was structured. This educational goal was viewed as important because of the belief that all proper subject access to materials was classificatory at its very heart. Thus, where patrons had access to printed catalogs and those catalogs were classified, they would, when reading such catalogs, also receive instruction about the idea of the universe of knowledge and its structure".

 

". . . As the twentieth century has proceeded, this more narrowly defined purpose has become document retrieval in and of itself, not document retrieval intermixed with other goals. . . .  it was no longer simply a tool to serve more general cultural or intellectual approaches to information" (Miksa, 1998, p. 77).

 

Miksa (1998, p. 39-41) discusses "differences in goals between library classification and the movement to classify knowledge and the sciences". He writes: "Those engaged in the classification of knowledge and, especially by the nineteenth century, especially those engaged in the classification of the sciences, appears to have been motivated by a need to explain the value of the rising sciences and the knowledge they produced" (p. 40). And: "In contrast, library classificationists had a much more practical, though no less exalted, task in view" (p. 40). 

 

Perhaps Miksa is here underplaying the motives and goals of "the movement to classify knowledge". If we take, for example, the positivist movement, their goal was clearly to use science to improve society. Classification of the sciences was an integral part of this endeavor. The "father of positivism", Auguste Comte, made a classification of the science in which he omitted psychology because he sought that this field was better to be considered either physiologically or culturally. The logical positivists of the 20th century made a reductionist system of the sciences in which physics served as the ideal sciences. All other fields should speak the language of physics. This gave rise to the movement known as behaviorism in psychology and other social sciences. Similar motives can be found in Hegel and the Marxist movement and probably in other movements too. In other words: The motive to seek structures in reality as well as in knowledge and the sciences may serve the same goal that motivated Francis Bacon in 1605 to published “The advancement of learning” (with a classification of the sciences): to improve the sciences and make them more useful for humankind.

 

If we consider scientific classifications such as, for example, biological taxonomy and the periodical system of chemical elements are such systems important both for scientific explanations and scientific research as well as for practical work. Miksa's statement reflects a widespread misunderstanding in the library community  that librarians are the real experts in classification and that contributions from other fields can thus be ignored by the LIS community (cf. also Grauballe et al., 1998; Hjørland & Nicolaisen, 2004; Nicolaisen & Hjørland, 2004). 

 

Jaenecke (1994) first consider that in order to answer "what is knowledge organization" we have to know what problems KO has to serve for us, we have to know its functions. This is an important consideration which brings the functions of KO to the forefront of its theoretical problems. Next, Jaenecke consider some basic concepts in communication theory and provides the following definitions:

In order to contain knowledge, the statements must be:

  1. General statements on a great number of things, not merely on individual things

  2. Ageless, hence not loose their validity after a certain time

  3. Permit rational decisions of general interest and not merely of interest to a special circle of persons

  4. Be exact so that, in principle, every human being may obtain from them the same information.

Not every message claimed to constitute knowledge meets the above conditions. Jaenecke classifies the messages into three classes:

Jaenecke points out that the production of pseudoknowledge causes a paradoxical problem: Users are drowning in a flood of messages and are at the same time thirsting for knowledge. The flood of peripheral knowledge and pseudoknowledge causes serious disorder in the store of knowledge, and this disorder is the most important problem that KO faces. 

 

To bring back order in the store of knowledge is not just the job for librarians and LIS-specialists, but also of authors, publishers and other agents involved in knowledge production and dissemination. It is however, important to realize the real nature of the problem of disorganized knowledge.

 

Jaenecke further argues that the phenomena of peripheral knowledge and pseudoknowledge have implications for how documents should be described and indexed by using archeological findings as models. He makes a distinction between the description of the intrinsic properties of an object (document or message) on the one hand and its external characteristics on the other hand. He finds:

 

 "The loss of quality of the material to be described evidently has had no effects  on the practice of content description: keywords are still assigned as they were before, but just as it is more troublesome to describe shards of pottery than complete vessels, so it takes more effort to assign keywords to peripheral knowledge than to core knowledge, while pseudoknowledge, with its empty shells of words that lack consistent contents, actually cannot be sensibly described at all" (Jaenecke, 1994, p. 9)

 

Unfortunately, no examples are given. At least some thought experiments would be illustrative for how the description of core knowledge is different from the description of peripheral knowledge. In general is Jaenecke rather dissipated in his description of the functions of KO. He does not make a distinction between bibliographies (which aim at providing comprehensive overview of publications) and tertiary literature such as encyclopedias, review articles and handbooks, which aim at providing overview of core knowledge. He does not consider how different methods of KO such as citation indexing, descriptors and full-text searching supplement each other. And he has no real suggestion for a research program in KO, just some vague thoughts of a coordinating function between cognitive science, epistemology and related fields. 

 

Perhaps the most important issue in Jaenecke (1994) is strongly played down: That criteria for organization of knowledge must be found in the theories that this knowledge is about. Jaenecke writes (p. 5) that for core knowledge "almost the entire knowledge is stored in theories regarding as firmly assured". It is exactly the theoretical assumptions that are the basis for the organization of knowledge. In post-Kuhnian times as ours, we should not think of theories as eternal. Nonetheless, they are the relatively stable level on which organized knowledge is based. 

 

Kiel's (1994) main argument is that what is regarded "pseudoknowledge" is relative. Different ages and different epistemologies differ in respect to what they consider "pseudoknowledge" and what has once been considered as such has the potential to develop to durable knowledge and should therefore not be screened out.  Differentiation of  knowledge as ''core knowledge'', ''peripheral knowledge'', and ''pseudoknowledge'' is rejected, since his conception of knowledge is limited  to a particular epistemology and knowledge domain. Knowledge organization should not be a normative one demanding producers and users to adhere to tight epistemological standards.

 

Conclusion:

The function of KO is to help users to navigate in information spaces, to retrieve documents, to make decisions for further search activities and overview information resources. There are many levels of KO and library and information professionals are not the only kind of professionals contributing to this aim.

 

 

Literature:

 

Broughton, V.; Hansson, J.; Hjørland, B. & López-Huertas, M. J. (2005). [Chapter 7:] Knowledge Organization. IN: European Curriculum Reflections on Library and Information  Science Education. Ed. by L. Kajberg & L. Lørring. Copenhagen: Royal School of Library and Information Science. (Pp. 133-148). [Report of working group on LIS-education in Europe. Working seminar held  in Copenhagen 11-12 August 2005 at the Royal School of Library and Information Science.] Available (full publication):  http://biblis.db.dk/uhtbin/hyperion.exe/db.leikaj05  (Chapter 7 alone: Chapter 7.pdf).

 

East, J. W. (2006). Subject retrieval of scholarly monographs via electronic databases. Journal of Documentation 62(5), 597-605.

 

Feinberg, Melanie (2007). Beyond retrieval: A proposal to expand the design space of classification. Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, vol. 1. Retrieved 2007-06-07 from: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1892/

 

Grauballe, H., Kaae, S., Lykke Nielsen, M., & Mai, J.-E. (1998). Klassifikationsteori [Theory of Classification] (2nd ed.). Copenhagen: Royal School of Library and Information Science. (Skriftserie I klassifikation; 1). [Compendium used in the teaching of classification theory]

Hawking, D. & Zobel, J. (2007).  Does topic metadata help with Web search? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(5), 613 - 628. Retrieved 2008-02-05 from: http://es.csiro.au/pubs/hawking_zobel_jasist.pdf

 

Hjørland, Birger & Nicolaisen, Jeppe (2004). Scientific and Scholarly Classifications are not "Naïve": a Comment to Begthol (2003). Knowledge Organization, 31(1), 55-61.

Nicolaisen, Jeppe & Hjørland, Birger (2004). A Rejoinder to Beghtol (2004). Knowledge Organization, 31(3), 199-201.

 

Miksa, F. (1998). The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-Modern Library. Albany, NY: Forest Press.

 

Jaenecke, P. (1994). To what end knowledge organization? Knowledge Organization, 21(1) 3-11. (For reply see Kiel, 1994).

 

Kiel, E. (1994). Knowledge organization needs epistemological openness: A reply. Knowledge Organization, 21(3), 148-152.

 

 

 

 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 05-02-2008

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Questions:

 

  1. Is "knowledge organization" restricted to print materials, something to be superseded by computer science? (Is somebody in the field expressing this view? or is this view somehow implicitly present?).

  2. Should computer scientists be criticized for not knowing and applying LIS principles as expressed by Milstead:

    3. "The explosive growth of Web search engines, with their primitive algorithms, has had some rather unfortunate effects, to my mind. Some of these engines appear to have been developed by people who saw a need, but who had not the vaguest idea that there was already a history of development of tools to fulfil similar needs. There is little evidence that some of these developers had ever used either Dialog or a library catalog. " (Milstead, 1998).

    Could it be claimed, that library catalogs should rather be characterized as primitive?

  3. Do you believe that Jaenecke (1994) is right in claiming that the store of human knowledge has become in disorder? How?, why?

  4. If Jaenecke (1994) is right in claiming that the store of human knowledge has become in disorder, what are the implications for LIS? (Is LIS primarily responsible for organizing knowledge, or only one among many parties? If only one among many, what is our specific role?)

  5. Two possible solutions not mentioned by Jaenecke (1994) are 1) to consider the hierarchy of journals as quality dimensions and thus, for example, use the impact factor as a way to sort  core knowledge from peripheral knowledge and pseudoknowledge 2) to consider review articles and related papers a a kind of quality estimates and thus use such papers as a way to sort  core knowledge from Peripheral knowledge and pseudoknowledge. Discuss the use of those two methods to solve Jaenecke's problem. (Compare those two suggestions with Jaeneckes suggestion to restrict the production or representation of literatures in libraries and databases).

  6. Kiel (1994) characterized Janecke's view as "realist" epistemology and his own view as "constructivist" epistemology (I would prefer "positivist" for Jaenecke's position and perhaps "relativist" for Kiel's ). However, the terminology is less important than the issue: Than epistemological questions according to Kiel (1994) are at the heart of the problem of knowledge organization. Discuss whether you think that KO can somehow escape getting involved in epistemological issues?

  7. Is the problem discussed by Jaenecke (1994) and Kiel (1994) relevant at all to information science? Should we not develop thesauri and other tools and not care about the quality of the materials indexed?

  8. Jaenecke (1994, p. 9) discusses a hypothetical example of 100 identical documents being nonrelevant for the users. On the other hand, most IR-techniques try to identify documents with high similarity. Discuss this paradox.

  9. Jaenecke (1994, p. 9) discusses some principles of indexing/describing informative objects (including representing intrinsic properties versus external characteristics). Discuss the viewpoint put forward.

  10. Kiel's (1994) point of view that rubbish/peripheral knowledge may become valuable is well known in libraries, and the library system is in fact designed to cope with this insight: That criteria of relevance of documents are historically contingent. How?

  11. Kiel's (1994) point of view that criteria of quality and relevance are relative (e.g. culturally) may be investigated more systematically by comparing (explicit or implicit) criteria associated with different approaches, paradigms, perspectives, metaperspectives, theories, metatheories, views, whatever you term it. What is the usefulness of studies of this kind for KO?

  12. What tasks, if any, do you think Knowledge Organization should be involved with in the area of digital media?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 05-02-2008

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