Introduction to knowledge organization systems and services

The new applications, contexts, and new twists of old themes and problems in the field of Knowledge Organization Systems (KSO) and Services was discussed. Diverse attempts have been applied to the outcomes of much work over the years in artificial subject languages and their intellectual structures to facilitate access to digital information in various setting. The KSOs, such as classification systems, gazetters, lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies, and thesauri, attempt to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain for the purposes of retrieval. The controlled vocabularies attempt to reduce ambiguity by defining the scope of terms and more complex vocabularies provide a set of effective synonyms for each concept. KOS are also used as resources by natural language research community to address retrieval problems including free text search, query expansion, terminology extraction, text mining, summarization, and translation.