Relationships in Knowledge Organization

Relationships that interconnect entity classes of import to knowledge organization (knowledge, documents, concepts, beings, information needs, language) include both non-subject bibliographic relationships (document-to-document relationships, responsibility relationships) and conceptual content relationships (subject relationships, relevance relationships). While the MARC format allows the recording of most bibliographic relationships, many of them are not expressed systematically. Conceptual content relationships include, in turn, interconcept and intraconcept relationships. The expression of interconcept relationships is covered by standard thesaural relationships, which typically do not distinguish fully between the underlying lexical relationship types. The full expression of complex intraconcept relationships includes indication of the basic nature of the relationship (including a set of semantic roles), the set of entities that participate in the relationship, and a mapping between participants and semantic roles. Knowledge organization schemes seldom express these relationships fully.