Facets of Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the ISKO UK Second Biennial Conference, 4‐5 July, 2011, London

Citation

Hider, P. (2013), "Facets of Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the ISKO UK Second Biennial Conference, 4‐5 July, 2011, London", The Electronic Library, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 535-536. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-04-2013-0059

This collection of papers celebrates the achievements of the late Brian Vickery, a prominent scholar in the fields of information organisation and retrieval, and a leading member of the Classification Research Group in the 1950s and 1960s. The content reflects the variety of interests pursued by Vickery over his career, and the various flavours of knowledge organisation research for which the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) serves as an umbrella. All papers from the conference have been included, plus abstracts for papers that presumably did not get written up, as well as a selection of papers by or about Vickery himself.

As part of the Classification Research Group, Vickery spent the earlier part of his career pioneering “classification for information retrieval”, and, more specifically, faceted, or analytic‐synthetic, classification. Several papers address unresolved issues: Gnoli considers first principles, as does La Barre; Tennis compares Vickery's approach with that of his theoretical predecessor, Ranganathan; Lee discusses facets used in music classification; Visser looks at facets conceived in the heritage domain; and Campbell explores how Farradane's relational indexing (in which the relationships between facets are themselves categorised) can be used to analyse consumer health information.

Of major interest to many contemporary classification researchers are folksonomies, produced by end‐users and other “social taggers”, and Lykke et al. explore how controlled vocabularies may, or may not, be used to support them (in this instance, the vocabularies were found to make little impact on the tagging). Unfortunately, all three of the papers presented in the session on “facets and folksonomies” consisted of abstracts only. A variation on the social tagging theme was represented by Steele's paper, which analysed the various LCSH that had been assigned to particular works by cataloguers, while Orna illustrated how “folksonomies” in a broader sense can also be studied, in her paper on knowledge representation in mediaeval Europe. Lykke contributed a second paper, with different co‐authors, on how doctors described their information needs through their search queries.

Another important strand in knowledge organisation research is the development of knowledge organisation systems for the semantic web. There were some notable papers in this area, including: Spiro's discussion of how pre‐coordinated systems would need to be translated; Žumer and Zeng's comparison of the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) model with that specified for the W3C's Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS); and Eito‐Brun's paper on the use of SKOS and SRU for archival materials.

Several papers evaluate the application of particular knowledge organisation systems: Bell and Vernitski report on the use made of the Humanities and Social Sciences Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET) in the UK Data Archive; Boccato and Fujita look at the subject headings used in a network of Brazilian libraries; again, unfortunately, all the papers in the “Making it work in practice” session on implementation consisted of abstracts only. Representatives of other standards also made contributions: Dextre Clarke reports on the development of the ISO's new standard for thesauri (25964), while Green and Mitchell discuss an automatic method to produce abridgments of DDC. A paper on what today's users want from music retrieval systems was presented by Debaecker and El Hadi.

The collection also contains some interesting papers for the historians of the field, including assessments of Vickery's contributions by his contemporaries, Foskett and Coates, and of the impact of the Classification Research Group as a whole, by Broughton. There is a full bibliography of Vickery's work, compiled by East and Adams, and an analysis of Vickery's theoretical contributions to information science by Robinson and Bawden. With a background in chemistry, Vickery's initial interest was in scientific information retrieval, and Lambe makes the telling observation, in his stimulating paper, that the design of successful retrieval systems depends, now more than ever, on input from the knowledge experts themselves (e.g. scientists), as well as from information professionals.

It is a pity the book contains a significant number of abstracts missing their papers, but the foregoing shows that there is probably something for everyone with an interest in knowledge organisation. Although some of the papers are fairly short, and some represent studies that were still in progress, there is plenty of well‐written and thoughtful material that invites the reader to investigate further. As such, the book is a representative sample of current knowledge organisation research, with contributions from some of the leading experts in the field. It serves as a fitting tribute to a scholar whose commitment to furthering the cause of knowledge organisation remained until the very end of his long life.