Integration of Knowledge Organization Systems into Digital Library Architectures

Digital library (DL) research and development has concentrated primarily on collections and on the services to build and access them (Arms, 2000). To some extent, there has also been a focus on users and uses and on how well digital library constructions satisfy them (Borgman, 2000). A class of DL components has been missing from this development. This class we call knowledge organization system (KOS) resources and by this we mean the set of familiar and evolving systems that organize and define the terminology and notations we use to represent and organize concepts and real world objects. Just as DL collections and services can be modeled in general frameworks that support the building of library architectures, it is also possible to integrate the variety of KOSs into the DL context and to extend DL architectures to include them in the development and use of collections and services. Treating KOS resources as tightly integrated components of DL architectures raises new research and development issues for the DL and the classification research communities.