Can Knowledge Organization (KO) researchers provide evidence that their work is changing the world for the better? What are the pieces of evidence? What are the metrics for KO research that effects positive social change?
This blog, and this first blog post, are asking this question. I believe it can be asked of KO writ large, including metadata design and implementation, ontology engineering, and cognate fields. However, my specific interest is in the field of KO [1].
The question is not whether what we do is good, it's how do we prove we're making positive social change by doing this expensive, time consuming, and seemingly rarefied research and development.
[1] Lifeboat for Knowledge Organization.
Available: http://www.db.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/home.htm
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3 comments:
"this is not merely an intellectual interest but has social and economic value [...] It is not merely a bibliothecal problem, nor on a higher plane is it a problem solely scientific or philosophic. It concerns all these and also the educational interests and those of social organization."
(HE Bliss, The organization of knowledge and the system of the sciences, Holt, New York 1929)
It is indeed a relevant question, so thank you Joe for rising it.
Some areas which in principle should be especially affected come to mind. University departments, and even government departments, are segmented according to a model of KO, though this can be poorly related to updated KO research.
More technical applications of KO are knowledge management in enterprises, or in services managing large amount of data. At the workshop on Levels of reality, John Sowa was defending analogy as a strategy for ontological inference, and Nicola Guarino replied that he would not trust an airport control system based on analogy. These seems to be very tangible effects of (better or worse) KO.
Claudio!
Great response. I like the Bliss quote and the link to contemporary discussions in ontology engineering. Social organization and the infrastructure of systems are two areas that we should set out as distinguishable parts of (or cognate fields to) KO, and address them on a functional level.
Thanks for this! I'll repost these issues too, if you don't mind :)
It is not my intention here to answer for Tennis questions about an engaged Knowledge Organization, however, I will discourse on what I believe that is tangential for the Knowledge Organization together with the society. For a lot of time, the librarian professional acted in an alienated manner and doesn’t worried about your transforming agent commitment. In this manner, acting only by the elites side, this professional contributes for an inequality increase about the informational literacy or the digital inclusion. So, this professional changed, once aware about your educational commitment, began to be critical and to collaborate with the public politics.
While mediator in the knowledge generation and disseminating process, this professional works in an area considered nuclear in the Information Science - the Knowledge Organization. Many scholars of this area produced tools which were transformed into true knowledge maps. Such tools are called classifications that, by ones’ turn, assist the librarian professional in your tasks of organize and represent bibliographical collections. However, such classifiers imposed your particular world view to the tools elaborated by them. This world view can be soaked with prejudgements, considered currently as bias.
Some dicotomic categorizations are bias examples, once that elapse of an aristotelian tradition of concepts opposition, which when is adopted of categorical manner, can evidence disrespect between different cultures, strengthening the superiority idea or proselytism (for example, the christian religions X no christian religions opposition).
Therefore, an engaged Knowledge Organization search to correct such bias because it prevents that one culture stands out of another one that one language stands out of anothes and so on. The librarian professional commitment is to be a critical mediator who supplies a general view about the produced knowledge, and with that the user must become aware of the diverse points of view about that theme or subject broached. Thus, the professional must evidence the Knowledge Organization ethical dimension, avoiding the preconceptions dissemination and contribute for the formation of a more fair society.
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