The Facets of Knowledge Organization: An Introduction

To classify is to put things into meaningful groups. Knowledge Organization is the domain concerned with t he ordering of knowledge in a meaningful and logical fashion. I. Dahlberg considered knowledge as what is known and organization as the activity of constructing something according to a plan. From the time of Melville Dewey till recently most theorists of knowledge organization and classificationists (to use a term coined by Ranganathan to refer to designers of systems for knowledge organization such as a scheme of classification) have adopted a more or less pragmatic approach largely restricting their discussions to issues relevant to the organization of recorded / documented knowledge. In other words the concern has largely been with knowledge artifacts such as books and other documentary resources. In this sense knowledge organization refers to descriptio n of documentary resources in terms of all relevant attributes. This 'documentary resource description - centered approach? to knowledge organization has dominated much of the thinking in the area since the time of Panizzi, Dewey and Cutter. Another importan t approach, though very recent, to knowledge organization is the 'use - centric' approach; i.e. to look at knowledge resources and their organization from the perspective of their potential use .