Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge

This volume sets out to present the current state of the art in relation to the expression of relationships in thesauri, classification schemes and other approaches to the organisation of knowledge. Fourteen chapters, authored by recognised authorities in the field of information retrieval, consider the concepts of relationships from a variety of different perspectives. This is a useful lens through which to examine information retrieval, and to promote reflection on the true nature of relationships within it. For example, it is challenging to reflect on the effect of the juxtaposition of bibliographic relationships (the subject of Chapter 2) and thesaural relationships (the subject of Chapter 3) in a digital environment, in which documents change, and the role of a thesaurus is to act as an interface between the natural language search items entered by the searcher and Web documents or pages. On the other hand, perhaps in sky gazing and considering the application of thesauri and classification schemes in contexts and applications many questions are left underexplored. But, before discussing what this book does not achieve, a more complete description of its contents will be useful.

The chapters in Part 1 address subject relationships from a general and scheme‐independent perspective. The chapter from Dextre Clarke gives a particularly effective review of the three basic thesaural relationships – equivalence, hierarchical and associative – and some of their sub‐categories. The following chapter explains the process by which standards are developed and presents the current standards for thesauri and indexes, focusing on their treatment of relationships. A chapter on multilingual thesauri includes both practical and theoretical insights into the use of thesauri in a global, multilingual society and economy.

Other papers in Part 1 explore the problems associated with vocabulary integration within the domain of medicine and examine the cultural dependence of relational systems. Chapters in Part 2 are concerned with the relational structure of several specific thesauri and classification schemes. These include the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), Colon Classification and the Dewey Decimal Classification.

Other chapters address relationships in knowledge organisation other than subject relationships. Two interesting chapters cover bibliographic relationships and relevance, respectively.

Whilst each of the individual chapters is carefully crafted and so conceptually challenging, the opportunity to draw the themes in the separate chapters together is not taken. This means that differences in approaches between chapters and omissions to an all‐embracing coverage of relationships go unremarked. Similarly, although the authors explain the content of each chapter, the rationale for including specific topics and/or thesauri and schemes is not explained. Indeed, if the book is going to speak to the proposed audiences of researchers from library and information science and from computer science (artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, information retrieval and natural language processing) as well as practitioners, such as developers of thesauri and classification schemes, developers of Web search engines and directories, indexers and subject cataloguers, and professional searchers, it needs to use language and explore themes that are relevant to these various audiences.

The book fails to shed the cloak of traditional indexing and classification. The principles are sound but there is little reference to how they can be used in a Web‐based environment and in Web search engines and directories where natural language and relevance‐ranking algorithms dominate. What of relationships in these applications? Are they dynamic, contextual and evolutionary? How can the relational networks in classification schemes inform menu‐structures and information architectures? Going back a little in time, what of PRECIS and related indexing systems? For their time, these embedded some very sophisticated considerations about the nature of relationships. How can these conceptual frameworks inform new approaches to the organisation of knowledge?

Finally, some of the fundamentals appear to be embedded rather than explicit. Although there are allusions to the difference between terms and concepts a more complete elaboration of the way in which language is used to represent concepts or real‐world entities would have been welcome, and might inform our understanding of the essential nature of indexing. The other associated question that might have been posed is: “what is a relationship?” The various typologies of relationships and examples hint at the answer to this question, but it is never explicitly posed or discussed.

At £61, this book is more likely to adorn the shelves of libraries than to attract many personal sales. It is an interesting book with some valuable chapters that could be used as the basis for practice or further research in this area.