Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives—An Editorial
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Knowl. Org. 41(2014)No.5 343 R.P. Smiraglia. ISKO 13’s Bookshelf: Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives—An Editorial ISKO 13’s Bookshelf: Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives— † An Editorial Richard P. Smiraglia Smiraglia, Richard P. ISKO 13’s Bookshelf: Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives—An Edito- rial. Knowledge Organization. 41(5), 343-356. 5 references. † I am grateful to Hyoungjoo Park for her assistance with analysis of these proceedings. 1.0 The 13th International ISKO Conference, has only a reference to its publica- Krakow, Poland tion elsewhere). The conference program lists seventy-seven papers Krakow, Poland was the host city for the 13th Interna- and twenty-three posters. This analysis is based on the pa- tional ISKO Conference held May 19-22, 2014. Confer- pers printed in the proceedings. As before, I was con- ence-goers attended a grand opening session in the Col- strained to manually index the proceedings in order to ana- legium Novum at the Jagiellonian University (JU); the lyze the citations in the papers, because Thomson Reuters conference was included as part of the celebrations of Web of Science is not indexing ISKO proceedings. However, the 650th anniversary of the JU. Three full days of re- I am pleased to learn that Elsevier’s SCOPUS is indexing search presentations followed in the venue of the Insti- ISKO international conference proceedings, which will be a tute of Information and Library Science at the JU. In great boon to dissemination of the core literature of KO. honor of the 25th anniversary of ISKO’s founding, atten- The original spreadsheet containing the references from all dees were treated to a talk at the opening session by of the papers can be found on my blog at http://lazy founding scientist Dr. Ingetraut Dahlberg, concerning the koblog.wordpress.com/. It continues to be a problem that bases of the science of knowledge organization (KO). inconsistent editing of the proceedings, particularly with re- The conference ended with a panel discussion on the fu- gard to citation practice (which, in this case, was not stan- ture of ISKO (see Green 2014). The high level of re- dardized), requires much manual cleaning of the data be- search and interaction highlighted at the conference is fore analysis can proceed. evidence of the vibrance of ISKO and of the still emer- gent science of knowledge organization. 2.0 International presence and thematic foci Since 2008 I have used the occasion of the international conference to bring a domain analytical lens to bear on This was the first international ISKO conference to be some core characteristics of the ongoing evolution of held in Poland, and it was very well-attended by partici- knowledge organization (see Smiraglia 2008, 2010, 2013). pants from all over the world. To get a sense of the na- Using the rubric of “ISKO’s Bookshelf,” my analyses are tional affiliations represented, the country of affiliation aimed at a key research question: “what are the contribu- of each first author was recorded. With the caveat that tors reading (or perhaps I mean citing)?” and its corollary, this method misses cases of international collaboration, “what can we observe in this manner about shifts in the in- Figure 1 shows the twenty countries represented. tension and extension of KO as a domain?” Those ques- Roughly a quarter of the contributions came from the tions inform the analysis presented in this editorial. United States, with another proximate third from Poland The conference proceedings (Babik 2014) were pub- and Brazil. It is not unusual for the host country to have lished in print at the conference and subsequently became a bulge in its numbers and here we see 17% from Poland available online at the Ergon-Verlag ISKO Members’ portal or roughly a sixth. Brazil, host country of the 2016 con- at http://www.ergon-verlag.de/isko_ko/. There are sev- ference, had 13%. India, host country in 2012, dropped enty-six papers represented in the proceedings (one paper from 18% (Smiraglia 2013) to 5%. There were no other https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2014-5-343 Generiert durch IP '54.70.40.11', am 23.12.2018, 05:04:54. Das Erstellen und Weitergeben von Kopien dieses PDFs ist nicht zulässig. 344 Knowl. Org. 41(2014)No.5 R.P. Smiraglia. ISKO 13’s Bookshelf: Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives—An Editorial Figure 1. Countries of Affiliation Program Theme Number of Papers Current Global Problems in Knowledge Organization 5 Knowledge Organization Domain and Epistemology 8 Methods of Knowledge Organization 6 Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) 4 Knowledge Organization Tools: Thesauri 2 Knowledge Organization Tools: Classifications 9 Knowledge Organization Tools: Taxonomy, Ontologies, Terminology 7 Automatic classification systems 2 Knowledge Organization and Representation for IRS 11 Knowledge Organization for Special Domain 6 Knowledge Organization for Libraries 6 Knowledge Organization Education 4 Knowledge Organization History and Future 5 Table 1. Program themes large clusters, although we see Singapore, Iran, Nigeria, sion.) Table 1 shows conference themes from the pro- Romania, Hungary and Taiwan this time, but nothing gram together with the numbers of papers in each: from Morocco or Algeria, who were newcomers in 2012. An interesting note is that a distinction is made be- Each host country’s organizing committee generates tween systems (KOS) and tools—thesauri, classifications, its own conference theme and then subsequently pro- taxonomies, ontologies, terminologies—which usually are vides thematic monikers for panel sessions. These can be described as KOS. Countries of affiliation associated with used to get a sense of the thematic core of the confer- each theme are visualized in Figure 2. ence, as a way of determining the parameters of the ex- The visualization shows how well spread the themes tension of the domain at this one point in time. (Co- are across global boundaries. Only two categories were word analysis is used later, below, to analyze the inten- country-specific: all of the papers on automated clas- https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2014-5-343 Generiert durch IP '54.70.40.11', am 23.12.2018, 05:04:54. Das Erstellen und Weitergeben von Kopien dieses PDFs ist nicht zulässig. Knowl. Org. 41(2014)No.5 345 R.P. Smiraglia. ISKO 13’s Bookshelf: Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives—An Editorial Figure 2. Themes by Countries sification came from Brazil, and all of the papers on The histograms help visualize the normativity of the KOS without specific definition came from the United means—most papers have between 10-20 references, and States. the age of most works cited peaks around 10 years. This is consistent with a social scientific epistemology. ANO- 3.0 Citation analysis VA indicates there is no statistically significant influence of either variable on the other. There were a total of 1,217 references in 76 papers, for a A mean age of cited work was calculated for each pa- mean of 16, and a mode and median of 15. The range per, and then these were averaged to develop a mean for was from zero to 45. A mean number of references per each country; these are shown together in Table 2 with paper per country also was calculated; these hovered the mean number of references per country. around the true mean at 18, with a range from 5 for Ro- The number of references was more or less consistent mania to 30 for Germany with all the rest near the mean. across geopolitical boundaries. The mean age of work cited There is an observable dichotomy in KO in which rough- ranged from 4.7 to 41.3, which is rather a wild divergence. ly equal numbers of research papers are epistemologically The explanation likely is the consistent dichotomy between either empirical science or humanistic narrative. The scientific papers and humanistic papers. The median of 8 former tend to have few recent citations, and the latter years tells us that there is a social-scientific distribution in tend to have many older citations. This conference is a bit the rate of absorption of scientific data in the community. of an outlier, because most of the papers fall into the sci- But the large discrepancy reminds us that quite a few au- entific range with 5-15 citations. Oddly, German papers thors in the domain are not reporting empirical evidence, at this conference had 30 or more citations. but rather are engaging in historical or rationalist narratives. Dates of cited works ranged from 1873 to 2014, or, Table 2 is arranged in ascending order of mean age of cited the age of works cited ranged from 0-141 years. The work per country; there seems no logical explanation other mean age of works cited was 15.6 years (the median was than that the countries with the larger number of papers 8). Thus the majority of works cited were fairly recent, as also have wider ranges in mean age of works cited. Table 2 shown in Figure 3. also shows the mean number of references per country. Figure 4 contains histograms of the distributions of Number of references and age of cited work also age of cited work and number of references. were arrayed by theme and this is shown in Table 3. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2014-5-343 Generiert durch IP '54.70.40.11', am 23.12.2018, 05:04:54. Das Erstellen und Weitergeben von Kopien dieses PDFs ist nicht zulässig. 346 Knowl. Org. 41(2014)No.5 R.P. Smiraglia. ISKO 13’s Bookshelf: Knowledge Organization, the Science, Thrives—An Editorial Figure 3.