Knowledge organization systems, network standards and semantic Web

Aimed at students of library and information science, this paper is introductory in nature and provides basic information about the relationship between knowledge organization systems, ontologies and the World Wide Web architecture known as the Semantic Web. The Web is expected to be gradually populated by content with formalized semantics that will enable the automation of content organization and its retrieval. As implied by its name, the Semantic Web will assume a higher level of connectivity which is going to be based on resource content and meaning while the information organization will predominantly be automatic i.e. based on machine to machine (m2m) information services. This is the reason why the Semantic idea is closely related to the development of ontologies (a simple explanation of an ontology and ontology languages is given based on relevant literature). Traditional knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as classifications and thesauri have been deployed for resource organization and discovery on the Internet and have become de facto standards in resource discovery. KOS tools are likely to become even more important with the Semantic Web, providing they can be exposed and shared using ontologically orientated standards.