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The construction sector is also a knowledge-intensive domain, in which effective and unambiguous communication and knowledge sharing are, at the same time, both essential yet difficult to accomplish. This is primarily due to the several professionals interacting and facing situations involving diverse resources, processes and activities. Each of them brings a different background and perspective, often generating poorly integrated information. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) are crucial for ensuring completeness, consistency and quality of information. Despite the international trend to encourage the development and use of controlled vocabularies, especially classification systems, until recently in Italy the national coordination policy has not been effective enough. This article describes the first national attempt made, the INNOVance Lexicon that collects and organises knowledge about construction products. It combines taxonomic, terminological and semantic aspects of knowledge and it is a reference language to support information exchange and sharing in collaborative context.

The vehicle to represent Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) in the environment of the Semantic Web and linked data is the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). SKOS provides a way to assign a URI to each concept, and this URI functions as a surrogate for the concept. This fact makes of main concern the need to clarify the URIs' ontological meaning. The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between the ontological substance of KOS concepts and concepts revealed through the grammatical and syntactic formalisms of natural language. For this purpose, we examined the dividableness of concepts in specific KOSs (i.e. a thesaurus, a subject headings system and a classification scheme) by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques (i.e. morphosyntactic analysis) to the lexical representations (i.e. RDF literals) of SKOS concepts. The results of the comparative analysis reveal that, despite the use of multi-word units, thesauri tend to represent concepts in a way that can hardly be further divided conceptually, while Subject Headings and Classification Schemes - to a certain extent - comprise terms that can be decomposed into more conceptual constituents. Consequently, SKOS concepts deriving from thesauri are more likely to represent atomic conceptual units and thus be more appropriate tools for inference and reasoning. Since identifiers represent the meaning of a concept, complex concepts are neither the most appropriate nor the most efficient way of modelling a KOS for the Semantic Web., Comment: 18 pages, 5 tables

The Journal of Information Science does not normally carry book reviews, but when the Editor received a copy of Martin Frické’s book, Logic and the Organization of Information, he thought it was too interesting to ignore. It succinctly encapsulates years of accumulated research and practice in the field, while also adding ‘logic’ into the mix. He asked me if I could think of a suitable way of acknowledging the work, and I proposed a collection of short pieces by prominent people in the information science community. This is not, then, a review; more a salute to the author for making explicit the fundamental relationship between the ancient disciplines of logic and knowledge organization.

This paper analyses selected literature on basic-level categories, explores related theories and discusses theoretical explanations of the phenomenon of basic-level categories. A substantial body of research has proposed that basic-level categories are the first categories formed during perception of the environment, the first learned by children and those most used in language. Experimental studies suggest that high-level (or superordinate) categories lack informativeness because they are represented by only a few attributes and low-level (or subordinate) categories lack cognitive economy because they are represented by too many attributes. Studies in library and information science have demonstrated the prevalence of basic-level categories in knowledge organization and representation systems such as thesauri and in image indexing and retrieval; and it has been suggested that the universality of basic-level categories could be used for building crosswalks between classificatory systems and user-centred indexing. However, while there is evidence of the pervasiveness of basic-level categories, they may actually be unstable across individuals, domains or cultures and thus unable to support broad generalizations. This paper discusses application of Heidegger’s notion of handiness as a framework for understanding the relational nature of basic-level categories.

The methodology presented in this paper is based on concept mapping, which is a technique for representing knowledge in graphs. Its applications are broader and cover, in addition to presentation of knowledge, the complex organization of systems such as web sites. The paper presents a method for reaching consensus from several organizations of data/web site independently produced by different people. A class of methods was initiated, considering a number of parameters that can be chosen in order to match closely any specific real-life application. Although the methodology can be fully automated in terms of a suitable computer program, it is meant to be mainly a useful tool for experts in web site organization.

This paper presents the results of a study examining the subject content of knowledge organization courses taught in ALA-accredited Library and Information Science (LIS) programmes. Close to 2000 course readings of introductory-level knowledge organization courses from 34 LIS schools in the USA and Canada were analysed and indexed. Results indicate that traditional bibliographic methods and practices remain at the core of knowledge organization courses. Findings also show that metadata has become a central component of course content and new topics from information architecture to markup languages and semantic web are becoming part of introductory-level knowledge organization education.

Scholarly events are important scientific communication channels. Our research goal is to satisfy scientists’ basic information needs by collecting, archiving and providing access to scholarly event information. Furthermore, we aim to satisfy users’ in-depth information needs by excavating scholarly meaningful information through reasoning about knowledge. A prerequisite to accomplishing this end is to define a description base for scholarly events to enable software agents to crawl and extract scholarly event data, and to facilitate unified access to this data. The collected data may then be mined for non-obvious knowledge. We present the design and implementation of an ontology for scholarly event description (SEDE) to achieve the research goal, and the application use case scenarios in scholarly event information space. The scenarios presented highlight the characteristics of the SEDE ontology.

At the time when the Institute of Information Scientists was launched, well established principles of classification, especially faceted classification, provided an excellent springboard for developments in knowledge organization thereafter. The principles of thesaurus construction and use were worked out during the first two decades of the Institute's existence. Up until the end of the 1980s, most practical systems to exploit any of these vocabularies were held on cards, some of them highly ingenious. The subsequent arrival of the desktop computer, soon followed by the growth of networks providing access to an almost unimaginable quantity and variety of resources, has stimulated evolution of the knowledge organization schemes to exploit the technology available. Anecdotes of events and practical applications of controlled vocabularies illustrate this account of developments over the period.

This paper assesses the range of equivalence or mapping types required to facilitate interoperability in the context of a distributed terminology server. A detailed set of mapping types were examined, with a view to determining their validity for characterizing relationships between mappings from selected terminologies (AAT, LCSH, MeSH, and UNESCO) to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme. It was hypothesized that the detailed set of 19 match types proposed by Chaplan in 1995 is unnecessary in this context and that they could be reduced to a less detailed conceptually-based set. Results from an extensive mapping exercise support the main hypothesis and a generic suite of match types are proposed, although doubt remains over the current adequacy of the developing Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) Core Mapping Vocabulary Specification (MVS) for inter-terminology mapping.

This paper describes a study of the teaching of knowledge organization in formal library/information courses. It is based on a questionnaire survey of academic institutions and professional associations in the UK, Australia and the USA, and of employers in various sectors in the UK, and supported by several in-depth interviews with educational specialists, and an analysis of the literature and of course content. The main findings are that: there is little divergence between the views of educators and employers/professional associations; all groups regard theoretical and conceptual knowledge as more important than practical skills; ‘cat and class’ retains its central role in the topic; there is an important role for continuing professional development.

This paper examines three ideas that affect the nature of research in information science: (1) the fact of the incoherent nature of information science, which results from the concept of ‘information’ being dealt with at different integrative levels; (2) the lack of an over-arching philosophical framework that might guide the development of methods; and (3) the problem of grounding research in the reality of everyday professional practice. It is suggested that, at one level, phenomenology offers an integrative philosophical perspective that might also help to resolve the research/practice spl

This article attempts to explain ideas regarding the integration of sciences as a systemic unity of greater complexity than may have been considered before. It is also another way to create a different organization of knowledge. An ascending or descending vertical integration might help in interpreting questions posed by mankind and in providing answers that are urgently required. All aspects of the global ecology, in the widest sense, appear to be threatened, and the problems need to be freshly addressed as solutions are urgently needed. A study of the vertical integration of sciences, with all its complexity, might provide some clues to practical answers.

It is often assumed that disciplines with a practical bent lack theoretical structure. Traditionally, the strengths of the professions involved in the information chain are identified primarily by reference to applied skills. Yet these professions, which include information managers, are not merely marginal adjuncts which service the research process and the generation of new knowledge. Daily, they work and think within an intellectual paradigm which encourages observation of, and participation in, all paradigms and a keen appreciation of the delineation of disciplinary territories. This paper intends to provoke debate.