Organization, Management and Engineering of Knowledge: Rivals or Complements?

Abstract

[Abstract] Knowledge Organization is a discipline that has its origin in the library field and was extended by new documentation and information tasks. Thought it claims to encompass all kinds and aspects of knowledge storage and retrieval it is bound more or less to the idea to express the structure of knowledge which is behind a scientific collection of objects and their descriptions. Its aim is to facilitate the exchange between scientists and their knowledge. Knowledge Management instead deals with the elicitation, processing and diffusion of economically important information. Knowledge gets here the main notion of competitive intelligence for a limited target and community. Knowledge Engineering is the technique of making cognitive units and links machine readable and processable. It achieves its advantage over human interaction and understanding with the growth of the data bases and the speed of numerical based decisions. Though rather surprising information mining might be possible by Knowledge Engineering a qualitative or ethical inference remains nearly unsolved. If one contrasts Knowledge Organization, Knowledge Management and Knowledge Engineering to each other these knowledge disciplines get a clearer shape and their special claims, contributions and limitations have to be taken into account. On the other hand it becomes obvious that facing the typical problems and solutions of all knowledge disciplines will result in better outcome in each. Thus practical solutions will always have to take into account these three aspects of knowledge at least.