ISKO and Knowledge Organization’s 25th Anniversary: The Future of Knowledge Organization and ISKO Panel Discussion
Rebecca Green · KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION · 2014
The main idea of this panel was to create a platform for discussing knowledge organization in the past, present, and future within ISKO.During the panel discussion the following three questions were asked: 1) What is knowledge organization (KO)? 2) What changes do you foresee in the future that will prove to be the most challenging for ISKO? 3) What is your ideal picture of what the ISKO of the future could be?How do we get there?1.0 What is knowledge organization?Rebecca Green: I will lead us off with two insights.First, according to the ISKO charter, "It is the aim of the Society [ISKO] to promote research, development and application of all methods for the organization of knowledge in general or of particular fields by integrating especially the conceptual approaches of classification research and artificial intelligence.The Society stresses philosophicological, psychological and semantic approaches for a conceptual order of objects."Second, in Dewey the rule of application instructs us to class a work on, say, a thesaurus of architecture-that is, the making of a thesaurus applied to architecturewith other works on architecture.But developing a thesaurus on architecture doesn't make the developer an architect.Against that backdrop, what is knowledge organization?Claudio Gnoli: What is KO as seen from the perspective of other people?There is a lot of work nowadays that actually is KO but is called with other names by the com-