Knowledge Organization System Design

Knowledge organization system (KOS) design is the principled specification of the artefacts — classification schemes, thesauri, subject heading lists, taxonomies, name and subject authorities, and ontologies — that organize recorded information for retrieval. Elaine Svenonius's The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization recast this work as the design of bibliographic languages, each with a vocabulary, a semantics, and a syntax, all justified by the user objectives an information system exists to serve: to find, identify, select, and obtain. KOS design begins from those objectives and the entities a domain contains, then specifies controlled vocabulary, fixes the mapping between terms and concepts, defines the syntax for combining terms, and evaluates the result against the objectives and against design principles. Standards such as ANSI/NISO Z39.19 supply the construction rules for the vocabulary layer.