lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

People ask me all the time what our institute “does.” When I say simply “research” I usually get a blank stare for a response. After all, what kind of “research” could there be in the organization of knowledge? And for that matter, what “is” the structure of knowledge—how could there be research into that?

Fortunately, the world press reports research about the order and structure of knowledge all the time. For example, in the October 25^th (2019) Economist there was a report about how a meta-analysis of museum research demonstrated there were more male specimens than female in museum collections used for research, and therefore, that the results of the reported research were not (as we might have it) ontologically sound. Meanwhile, on television 60 Minutes reported on November 24^th 2019 that specific concepts are recognizable by electrical patterns in the brains of humans who embrace them. In other words, a biometric sign that specific meanings actually do, despite the influence of phenomenological philosophies and epistemological stances, cause commonality of understanding across the human species. Both of these studies are meta-analyses of prior empirical studies—from simple descriptive research to experimentation—thus both contribute to the growth of the theory of the order of knowledge, and in the latter case its structure as well.

In Elements of Knowledge Organization (2014, 7) I wrote: “At the most basic level, theory is a frequently‐tested (and thereby affirmed) statement of the interacting requirements of a phenomenon. In empirical research, theory is both the accumulated wisdom of the paradigm from which hypotheses are cast and the constant reaccumulation that occurs as each hypothesis is tested” and “theory exists in domains where a large quantity of research has been very productive at generating workable explanations and also at identifying inadequate or erroneous statements.” The growth of theory requires both large numbers of replicable research studies, and meta-analyses of those studies that demonstrate both results and gaps. In knowledge organization, it is critical that studies of ontological spaces be conducted, replicated and analyzed across studies and across time. In post-modern knowledge organization, which is domain-centric, this means analysis of specific concepts within specific domain ontologies. But we also have in meta-analysis the opportunity to compare ontological structures, which can themselves be classified, compared and tested, to understand how domains are or are not comparable. These are the goals of our institute. We work with the theoretical underpinnings of working knowledge organization applications. But we do so at a meta-level, seeking to understand both the ontological priorities of a domain and the ontical structures of its conceptual knowledge base.

My last two editorials in Knowledge Organizationwere pleas for empirical research. In (2017) I pleaded with the community to take up replication and theory building. On ISKO conference program committees (both regional and international) referees frequently criticize research with the phrase “we have seen this before.” But, of course, replication is critical to create reliability across results of different studies. Until we have replications of the same data from the same methodologies and even the same data from diverse methodologies, until then we cannot have faith in the reliability of our theoretical constructs. Empirical science relies on theoretical statements that indicate the probability of occurrence more than 99% of the time. Although systems for the organization of knowledge are as old as civilization itself, the empirical study of KO stems only from the past half century. In 2015 (31-33) I analyzed the existing domain analytical studies; at that time only a few very broad domains (archives, image searching, LGBT, physics and social media) had been studied 3 times, and only music (an immense domain) had been studied 4 times, and KO itself had been studied 22 times. It is critical to deepen the understanding of domain ontologies if we are to grow theory of both knowledge organization and knowledge structure.

In my most recent editorial (2020) I tried to point to increasingly problematic behavior of scholars in KO with little or only casual regard to referencing. References often are crafted rather than extracted from source publications. Authors often cite works that have not been read. I consider this is a form of intellectual dishonesty that pushes ethical boundaries. The importance of replication extends to the evidentiary component of every published study—if the sources cannot be consulted in replication how can we have confidence in published results?

The role of IKOS then is to meet the demand for empirical KO by pursuing in real time the work of empirical research in domain ontologies and ontical structures. To that end we first took up a meta-analysis of studies of KO. The results of that study are now compiled in our first technical report (IKOS 2020). Two products of that study are visible on our website in the form of the corpus bibliography (https://knoworg.org/meta-analysis-of-the-knowledge-organization-domain-corpus-bibliography/) and a dynamic Formal Taxonomy of Knowledge Organization (https://knoworg.org/a-formal-taxonomy-of-knowledge-organization-version-1-0/).

In late 2019 we tackled the phenomena of music for a phenomenon-based classification. The result of that work, which is still underway, will include new facets for medium of performance, and form and genre. An exciting development will be a facet for audiography, derived from meta-analysis of empirical studies of music information retrieval (Szostak and Smiraglia 2020). This facet will include details of capture, production and dissemination, and user purpose and emotion.

In 2020 it is our intention to tackle homosexual nomenclatures. We also have begun to work on the domain of nursing information behavior, basing our initial analysis on the 2005 dissertation by Edmund Pajarillo. A teaser visualization of simple phrases appears in Figure 1.

We can see here the potential outline of facets for a taxonomy—geographic health, information leads, nursing process, information behavior, information resources. We will work to grow that taxonomy as we are able.

In all of this research we are doing what we can to contribute—to give back—through research by meeting the demand for empirical knowledge organization.

References

IKOS (Institute for Knowledge Organization and Structure, Inc.). 2020. Technical Report: Meta-Analysis of Knowledge Organization as a Domain. IKOS Technical Reports Series no. 1. Lake Oswego, OR: IKOS.

Pajarillo, Edmund J.Y. 2005. “Contextual Perspectives of Information for Home Care Nurses: Towards a Framework of Nursing Information Behavior (NIB).” PhD diss., Long Island University.

 “Scientists are using MRI scans to reveal the physical makeup of our thoughts and feelings.” 60 Minutes November 24, 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/functional-magnetic-resonance-imaging-computer-analysis-read-thoughts-60-minutes-2019-11-24/

“Sexual Selection: Collections of Animals Favour Male over Female Specimens.” Economist October 25^th (2019): 74. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/26/why-museums-animal-collections-favour-males

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2014. The Elements of Knowledge Organization. Cham: Springer.

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2015. Domain Analysis for Knowledge Organization: Tools for Ontology Extraction. Chandos InformationProfessional Series. Oxford: Elsevier/Chandos.

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2017. “Replication and Accumulation in Knowledge Organization—An Editorial.” Knowledge Organization 44: 315-17. 

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2020. “Referencing as Evidentiary: An Editorial.” Knowledge Organization 47: 4-12. doi:10.5771/0943-7444-2020-1-4

Szostak, Rick and Richard P. Smiraglia. 2020. “Identifying and Classifying the Phenomena of Music.” In Linking Knowledge: Linked Open Data for Knowledge Organization and Visualization, ed. Richard P. Smiraglia and Andrea Scharnhorst. Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 2021, 143-48. Also in Knowledge Organization at the Interface: Proceedings of the Sixteenth International ISKO Conference, 2020, Aalborg, Denmark, ed. Marianne Lykke, Taja Svarre, Mette Skov and Daniel MartÍnez-Ávila. Advances in Knowledge Organization 17. Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 421-27.

*Published in print as: Smiraglia, Richard P. 2020. “The Demand for Empirical Knowledge Organization.” IKOS Bulletin 2, no.1 : 8-10.

p. 83-84: Descartes made one of the first attempts to explain the concept of the affections in his last book, The Passions of the Soul of 1649 …. Descarte’s book was followed a year later by the Musurgia universalis of the “last Renaissance man,,” Athanasius Kircher …. Kircher was very much a believer in music not only as a mirror but as a fundamental element of Creation itself …; music was not so much a reflection or approximation of God’s perfect design, but an emanation of the divine Itself. Kircher’s motto was: “Music is nothing other than the knowledge or the order of all things.”

James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

About ten days ago there was a breathless story on the evening news about how “more information” appearing on New York City fast food menus was not being used by consumers. Told that sandwich A had 150 calories and sandwich B had 850 they were all buying sandwich B. How could this be?, wondered the newscaster, that people overlooked “information.” All of the talking heads interviewed were chefs, consumer advocates, and dietitians.

Not one knowledge organization specialist. Not one commentary on “concepts” of food, or the problems of homonymy and synonymy and meronymy, not one comment on cognition or cognitive overload or navigating networks pathways. A missed opportunity I think; we should’ve been right there, commenting.

In last week’s Economist is a story about “Ad scientists” with a headline image that looks an awful lot like some of my WordStat™ visualizations–lots of little boxes with network lines connecting them in pretty colors; all of it cast as terminological catch in a fishnet. The story begins with the example of what happens when someone searches “tennis balls” using three different search engines. Some of the results are said to be “organic” and others are paid links.

Now, why are no knowledge organization scientists cited in this paper?

How could it be that searchers are thrown off by overload, in which case they turn to the first available organic link (Patrick Wilson’s “relevance as means-to-an-end”; cognitive overload, etc. etc.)

Sigh ….

Family life being what it can be, I just spent two weeks sitting in a hospital, managing the care of my significant other (who now has recovered, btw). At the peak of the crisis he was in intensive care, where the large critical care team made me a part of their deliberations. It was curious in a number of interesting ways. But, this is my KO blog. On the morning of ASIST SIG/CR Classification Workshop, which I had to miss, I emailed my colleague and former doctoral student Chris Marchese about our co-authored presentation. I sent her this little story:

“Last night I had an experience. Dr. A and B were telling me he has condition X and Y. I said, that’s nothing new, I asked you to talk to his own doctor. They said “We have our own specialists” and I said, his doctor is a world-reknowned specialist and has two decades of data on his health and chronic conditions. I’m an information scientist, we encourage teams to talk to each other across their self-imposed boundaries.” They gave me a  kind of stunned look, but the next morning as I arrived they told me they had the file and had summoned his w-r-s doctor. But, it kept occurring to me that this is what our work is about, finding out how team A talks to its members, so we can learn how they are describing the same thing as Group 11, even though they seem to be working in different worlds. This is the importance of what we’ve done with CWA.”

There was a fascinating paper about boundary objects at Mysore this summer by Michael Shepherd and Tara Sampalli “Ontology as Boundary Object” (see the Mysore proceedings p. 131). Directly relevant, it showed how terms in clinical notes sometimes were misfires with terms in medical records, but the misfire was what made them boundary objects. I think there was to have been a paper about boundary objects at SIG/CR as well.

It behooves us to look more closely at this manner of creating interontological discourse.