Home
Resources
Knowledge Organization Systems - Guides and Manuals

Guides to building Knowledge Organization Systems

This section addresses the know-how of building a Knowledge Organization System: from identifying concepts within a document or domain, to labelling them, and then organizing these concepts into a structured system, showing semantic relationships between them. Mastering these techniques is crucial for developing one's own Knowledge Organization System (KOS) when existing systems do not meet specific requirements.

Classification made simple - an Introduction to Knowledge Organisation for Information Retrieval by Eric Hunter.

Essential classification by Vanda Broughton

Basic Steps in the Creation of a Structured Vocabulary by Leonard Will

Getting a Great Start to Creating Structured Vocabulary by Leonard Will

Essential thesaurus construction by Vanda Broughton

Thesaurus Principles and Practice - A webpage from the former Willpower Information consultancy laying out the foundations of thesaurus practice - what is it and why it's useful, how to make one, and how and when to use one. A bibliography point to further resources.

Glossary of terms relating to thesauri and other forms of structured vocabulary for information retrieval - A glossary drawn up by Leonard Will along with Stella Dextre Clarke, Alan Gilchrist and Ron Davies when working on the British Standard for thesaurus construction, BS8723. BS8723 has now been withdrawn.

Thesaurus construction and use: a practical manual by Jean Aitchison, Alan Gilchrist and David Bawden

Taxonomies: Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information ed. Helen Lippell

Finding the concept, not just the word: a guide to ontologies and semantics by Brandy King and Kathy Reinold

How to build a Knowledge Graph by Paul Appleby

Introduction to controlled vocabularies - Terminology for Art, Architecture and other Cultural Works by Patricia Harpring. It includes a very comprehensive introduction to the process of vocabulary control in general.

How to build a Knowledge Graph by Paul Appleby

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) - is a thesaurus of unique concepts, focused on geographic places, both administrative entities and physical features.

Geonames - This database covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames.

From one place to a different place - problems of vocabulary control of geographic names and concepts by Vanda Broughton

Library of Congress authority list - You can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title, and Name/Title combinations.

National Information Standards Organization (NISO) - Standards and Publications

American National Standards Institute & the National Information Standard Organization (ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005) Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. (Free access in PdF format)

International Organization for Standardization. 2011. ISO 25964-1: Information and documentation - thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies - Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.

International Organization for Standardization. 2013. ISO 25964-2: Information and documentation - thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies - Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.

List of Software to manage Knowledge Organization Systems

VocBench: VocBench is a web-based, multilingual platform for managing thesauri, ontologies, lexicons and generic RDF datasets. Although it is web-based, you can install and run it locally with one of these downloads.