University of Washington Information School

Exploring the limits and benefits of knowledge organization

What is the future of our information organization tools?  What aspects of historical or current practice is applicable to new and emerging technologies?  Researchers in knowledge organization are interested in exploring the limits and benefits of transcribing current work into a new technologies and new contexts.

Charting large-scale category evolution

Joseph T. Tennis and Jevin West are studying the changes of the wikipedia category system.  

Importance of literary artifact custodianship

"Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices." - University of Pennsylvania Press

What We Do

Knowledge organization is the field of scholarship concerned with the design, study, and critique of the processes of organizing and representing documents that societies see as worthy of preserving. This field, as stated, has three parts: design, study, and critique. Each of these parts has its own set of epistemologies, theories, and methodologies – all manifest in the scholarship carried out by KO researchers.

Knowledge organization is concerned with metadata, catalogues, indexing, native ways of knowing, cluster analysis, category formation, and representation.

News

iSchool's Jin Ha Lee earns 2016 WiMIR Award

Assistant Professor Jin Ha Lee earned a WiMIR (Women in Music Information Retrieval) Award in August 2016.

Knowledge Organization researchers honored for recent work

Some recent awards garnered by Knowledge Organization researchers.

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Events

There are currently no upcoming events

Featured Projects

Enabling Crossmedia Advisory Services

A three-year research project investigating the common “appeal factors” across multiple types of media, including books, films, video games, graphic novels, and music, to support the provision of robust, 21st century readers’ advisory services in libraries. The goal of this research is to enable libraries to use appeal factors to provide crossmedia advisory services.

Linked Data for Education (LD4E)

An online Linked Data Exploratorium based on a Competency Index for Linked Data (“Index”) to provide students, professionals, and instructors in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) field with structured access to learning resources about Linked Data technology. 

Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus Project

"The Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation" project constructed a user-centered thesaurus, designed to reflect the information-seeking behavior of scholars and researchers who study American Indian subjects. This thesaurus enabled libraries, archives, and museums to more effectively organize information related to American Indian subjects. It is anticipated that this thesaurus may be used in conjunction with the Library of Congress Subject Headings.