TY - JOUR

T1 - Information Retrieval and Knowledge Organization

T2 - A Perspective from the Philosophy of Science

AU - Hjørland, Birger

N1 - artikel for særnummer om vidensorganisation

PY - 2021/3/20

Y1 - 2021/3/20

N2 - Information retrieval (IR) is about making systems for finding documents or information.Knowledge organization (KO) is the field concerned with indexing, classification, and representingdocuments for IR, browsing, and related processes, whether performed by humans or computers.The field of IR is today dominated by search engines like Google. An important difference betweenKO and IR as research fields is that KO attempts to reflect knowledge as depicted by contemporaryscholarship, in contrast to IR, which is based on, for example, “match” techniques, popularitymeasures or personalization principles. The classification of documents in KO mostly aims at reflectingthe classification of knowledge in the sciences. Books about birds, for example, mostly reflect(or aim at reflecting) how birds are classified in ornithology. KO therefore requires access tothe adequate subject knowledge; however, this is often characterized by disagreements. At the deepestlayer, such disagreements are based on philosophical issues best characterized as “paradigms”. NoIR technology and no system of knowledge organization can ever be neutral in relation to paradigmaticconflicts, and therefore such philosophical problems represent the basis for the study of IRand KO.

AB - Information retrieval (IR) is about making systems for finding documents or information.Knowledge organization (KO) is the field concerned with indexing, classification, and representingdocuments for IR, browsing, and related processes, whether performed by humans or computers.The field of IR is today dominated by search engines like Google. An important difference betweenKO and IR as research fields is that KO attempts to reflect knowledge as depicted by contemporaryscholarship, in contrast to IR, which is based on, for example, “match” techniques, popularitymeasures or personalization principles. The classification of documents in KO mostly aims at reflectingthe classification of knowledge in the sciences. Books about birds, for example, mostly reflect(or aim at reflecting) how birds are classified in ornithology. KO therefore requires access tothe adequate subject knowledge; however, this is often characterized by disagreements. At the deepestlayer, such disagreements are based on philosophical issues best characterized as “paradigms”. NoIR technology and no system of knowledge organization can ever be neutral in relation to paradigmaticconflicts, and therefore such philosophical problems represent the basis for the study of IRand KO.

UR - https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information

M3 - Journal article

VL - 12

SP - 1

EP - 26

JO - Information (Switzerland)

JF - Information (Switzerland)

SN - 2078-2489

IS - 3

M1 - 135

ER -