Challenges of Knowledge Organization and Isko

Traditionally Knowledge Organization is the ordering of documents on a bookshelf and the indexing of these in a more or less one-dimensional catalog. Now with the Web, its many and hyperlinked, distributed and heterogeneous sources the plain terminological approaches are no longer sufficient. Given this, ISKO has to rethink its mission. The new Knowledge Organization, which aims at the Semantic Web 3.0 tries to combine different Knowledge Organization systems by shared metadata and formalized ontologies. While the semantic approaches have quite an opposite approach to the user driven systems the future might lay in a combination of logical descriptions, specialized evaluation, and self-organizing principles, what could be named "Self Organizing Knowledge Organization Systems". There are open questions which need to be solved in future by ISKO and similar organizations.