Knowledge organization — State, demands, ideals: A panel synopsis

Abstract

On the 13 th conference of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) 2014 in Krakow a panel was held on 'The Future of Knowledge Organization and ISKO'.Here a synopsis with additional information and more dense presentation is given by a panelist. The main items were: What is knowledge organization (KO)? What will be the most challenging for ISKO and KO in the future? What is your ideal picture of ISKO and KO of the future? The results were inter alia that KO is a general discipline and applicable in many areas, though it is mostly perceived as part of information and library science. To ameliorate its standing not only the fundamentals have to be worked out but also its diverse application fields and openness to new objects and methods. To integrate cultural and semantic diversity is seen as its power and importance.

Concept theory in library and information science: an epistemological analysis

“…Ingetraut Dahlberg (1928–2017) is acknowledged to be one of the founders of the KO field as we know it (Ohly, 2018), being one of her most famous contributions the “analytic, object-related conceptual theory.” In the present paper, we aim to analyze the literature that acknowledges the influence of Dahlberg’s concept theory in order to understand the ways it has been understood and its impact in the KO/LIS field. Our objectives are: (i) to present and discuss the epistemological bases of the concept theories, in particular Dahlberg’s analytic-synthetic theory; (ii) to identify the literature on concept theory in the database library and information science source (EBSCO); (iii) to analyze and classify the epistemological approaches in those papers related to concept theory.…”

“…During the 1970s, Dahlberg presented a theory for the extraction of knowledge units: the analytic, object-related conceptual theory. As Dahlberg’s biographer Peter Ohly (2018) pointed out, the main reference for her theory was to the work of Frege (1969). Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was a German philosopher and logician whose work has been a huge influence in analytic philosophy and mathematics, especially arithmetic.…”

“…His approach to concepts (for instance, in “On Concept and Object,” Frege, 1892) clearly follows a rationalist approach and was a big influence in Dahlberg’s logic. In this vein, Dahlberg gave the following definition of concept that has been consistent in time: “A concept is a knowledge unit, comprising verifiable statements about a selected item of reference, represented in a verbal form” (Dahlberg, 1978, p. 143); “A concept is a unit of knowledge that is made by making substantial and verifiable statements about a reference object that summarize them in a short and descriptive denomination (name or code) for the purpose of communicability” (Dahlberg, 2014, 37ff cited in English translation in Ohly, 2018).…”

“…The social aspects of the approaches to the formation of concepts were disregarded as ineffective in the case of artificial intelligence (Martínez-Ávila, 2015) as well as in Dahlberg’s concept theory. Ohly (2018) comments on Dahlberg’s theory that, in contrast to the formation of concepts, “the linguistic aspect prevents the analytic aspect of concept formation and conceptual knowledge” (Dahlberg, 2017, p. 13). Dahlberg rationalist ideal and its effectiveness in the natural sciences is reflected in the following quote: “the capacity of the natural sciences to coin neologisms for new concepts provides a motive and possibility for normalization not available to social scientists.…”

“…This quote and the position of Dahlberg can be arguably aligned with the traditions of LIS/KO and the discourse of their seminal founders (many similar quotes can be found in the “armies, railroads and procrustean beds” metaphors by Dewey and many others deconstructed by Olson, 1997, 2001, 2002). Other criticism “on ‘conceptual culture’ in the social sciences” by Dahlberg during the late 1990s (in German) and the responses are discussed by Ohly (2018).…”