Knowledge Organization System

Knowledge is the most precious kind of information. Knowledge is accumulated, trusted, shared, interpreted information which is understood within some context giving the information meaning. Meaning is not something inherent. Meaning is consciously and deliberately produced through shared human systems, shaped by context, and sustained by communities of stakeholders.

A knowledge organization system (KOS) is a broad but neutral umbrella term that seems to be evolving and spans traditional library tools and modern information science and semantic web structures. Knowledge organization systems include a variety of approaches that are fundamentally used to organize, manage, and support retrieval and to make use of information. A knowledge organization system is a tool for organizing that shared, trusted accumulated information which forms knowledge for a group of stakeholders.

A knowledge organization system includes capabilities to specify the following in human interpretable and/or machine interpretable form and are described independent of any implementation: (Logical Theory)

  • Controlled vocabulary (a.k.a. dictionary, name authority) which used to specify privative and compound elements.
  • Metadata which enables classification and categorization and establishes identity of elements.
  • Taxonomy which imposes hierarchy of connections of different types of elements. 
  • Thesaurus which maps association and equivalence of elements.  
  • Schema which enforces structural validity of composition of compound elements.  
  • Ontology which enables reasoning based on the formal rules of logic.
  • Conditions (a.k.a. assertions, restrictions, constraints, rules) which must be universally satisfied which enable verification of knowledge represented within the system.
  • Knowledge graph which integrates the controlled vocabulary, metadata, taxonomy, thesaurus, schema, ontology, conditions, and facts (a.k.a. measurements, observations) into one unified queryable whole.

I refer to the combination of all of the above as a theory which described organized knowledge and for which a formal proof may be provided which confirms that a knowledge organization system is working as would be expected.

Approaches can be put into a spectrum or range of  capabilities that spans from a simple and less powerful list of terms such as a dictionary to a significantly more powerful and machine-interpretable ontologies and the knowledge graphs explained by those ontologies using capabilities such as the Semantic Web Stack.

There are many different ways to describe a knowledge organization system as shown by this mind map below provided by the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO):

The point is to be complete and to consciously govern a collection of knowledge to minimize epistemic risk.

The objective of a knowledge organization system is to provide something useful to stakeholders who are interested in achieving some goal(s) and/or objective(s).

Additional Information:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Overview

Image
( Executive summary ) Innovation doesn’t arrive. Innovation evolves. Imagine it.  Freedom from drudgery. Freedom from the toil of tedious, repetitive, mundane, monotonous tasks. Far less time needs to be spent fulfilling the role of "data janitor".  Time spent "transaction chasing" is significantly reduced. Accounting is a well understood system which has evolved over many thousands of years. Accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis is being digitized. This digitization will enable processes to be industrialized  and productivity boosts to be realized.  This overview is an attempt to take the work that I have done to understand XBRL-based reports and back into a framework for explaining those reports, accounting and audit working papers, analysis models to accountants and software engineers building software for accountants.  I am now referring to this as model-driven reporting . The sources of the information provided below are my " lab notebook " f...
Read more

Reference Reporting Frameworks

Image
A financial reporting scheme is a purposeful arrangement of financial line items, totals, subtotals, aggregations, disaggregations, structures, metadata, categorization, classification, assertions, restrictions, constraints, other conditions, etc. A financial reporting scheme represented in a digital format should not be semantically impoverished. Leaving information out, consciously or unconsciously, is not desirable. These reference reporting frameworks provide the minimum of what is necessary. They are modest, not impoverished, yet not as secure as they actually need to be. The following are a set of reference reporting frameworks (a.k.a. reporting schemes, knowledge regimes) which helps those interested in understanding how to create an industrial strength reporting scheme using the Seattle Method to do so. Included with each reporting framework is a reference report which tests the entire reporting framework and a number of reports which helps one understand the notion of reportin...
Read more

Core Pattern

Image
The core idea of XBRL is global open industry standard for information exchange  that is machine-interpretable that is also interpretable by humans (i.e. one version of information, usable by both humans and machines). This is achieved using the notion of the " information block ". The meaning conveyed by that information block is expressed using the XBRL global open industry standard format. Having one version of information that is readable by both a machine and a human means that a common shared cognitive understanding and mutual knowledge provided by the information block is usable by both machine and human. An information block is a holon . An information block is an organism . An information block is a semantic unit which is stable and structurally sound. An information block is both a stand alone unit and a component of a larger unit which has robust structural integrity.  Tensegrity . Epistemic traceability is a trail of thought and reasoning; the ability to track ex...
Read more