The first main thesis of the paper is that an ontology is not a catalogue of the world, a taxonomy, or a terminology. If anything, an ontology is the general framework within which catalogues, taxonomies, and terminologies may be given suitable organization. The second main thesis is that reality is organized into diverse levels and there are sophisticated dependences among these levels and wit...

Knowledge has become the main value driver for organizations nowadays. In particular, knowledge-based organizations (KBOs) allocate resources for intangible assets (e.g., R&D) in the rapidly changing and highly competitive environment in order to gain competitive advantages. Therefore, how to evaluate knowledge-based organizations has become one of the most important issues in knowledge managem...

To support applications, such as efficient browsing in large knowledge bases and cooperative knowledge discovery in large databases, the concept of rule similarity is essential. In this paper we define such a measure, called distance, and then put in the service of various knowledge exploration processes. Rule distances allow us to place all the available knowledge on a “map”, in which proximit...

Information today is often distributed among many different system within a complex IT environment. Using this information for creating knowledge organization systems and services thus involves using this distributed information and re-purposing it within new applications. The current trend in Web technologies to build systems not in a monolithic fashion, but rather intended as building blocks ...

Increasingly, both practitioners and theorists put forward " knowledge " as a deux ex machina for achieving competitiveness. Obviously, in a general sense, all firms or organizations may be said to operate on knowledge in developing their strategies, deciding on a division of labour, etc. (Blackler, 1995). This is true about mechanistic bureaucracies as well as more organic or flexible organisa...

So far, within the Library and Information Science (LIS) community, Knowledge Organization (KO) has developed its own very successful solutions to document search, allowing for the classification and search of millions of books. However, current KO solutions are limited in expressivity as they only support queries by document properties, e.g., by title, author and subject. In parallel, within t...

How are we able to construct truly realistic representations of knowledge organizations (KOs)? The paper introduces and defines the knowledge profile as a method to investigate the epistemological basis of any KO to outline the consequences this basis has upon its research object. The knowledge profile is inspired by C. S. Peirce’s doctrine of pragmaticism, and it further reflects the relevance...