From knowledge organization to knowledge representation

LIS developed its own very successful solutions for the classification and search of documents. In KO, search is focused on document properties (e.g. title, author, subject). KO tends to fail in situations when users express their needs in terms of entity properties (e.g., of the author).

The usefulness of moving from KO to KR

• KO is methodologically very strong, but subjects are limited in formality and expressiveness as, by employing classification ontologies,  it only supports queries by document properties.
• KR, by employing descriptive ontologies, supports queries by any entity property, but it is methodologically weaker than KO.
• We propose the DERA* faceted KR approach
• DERA, being faceted, allows the development of high quality and scalable descriptive ontologies
• DERA, being a KR approach, allows modeling relevant entities of the domain and their E/R/A properties and enables automated reasoning.
• It supports a highly expressive search of documents exploiting entity properties.

* DERA is a KR approach as it models entities of a domain (D) by their entity classes (E), relations (R) and attributes (A)