Knowledge Organization (KO) is a field of study that comprises techniques to organize documents, concepts and the relationships between them. KO seeks to increase the interoperability mechanisms and enable these techniques to be used in the media,, worldwide Related fields include information classification, information retrieval, information visualization, and knowledge acquisition.

KO should not be confused with knowledge management(KM), since the latter tends to be focused on organizations, whereas KO has a more general application, less focused on the practical aspects of organizations, whose objectives are more concrete and explicit. Nevertheless, KM is supported by KO, since it represents one of its basic areas of activity.

Many methods to organize knowledge are based on the principles of librarianship; library resources used in KO include controlled vocabularies and classification schemes (v. indexing language, thesaurus,taxonomy).

 

Related fields often overlap; some of these fields and their associated resources are:

• Linguistics: NLP tools like taggers, stemmers, terminological and lexical databases, etc. 
• Artificial Intelligence: ontologies, neural networks, and reasoning engines 
• Statistics and data mining: classifier and clustering algorithms 
• Information Extraction and Retrieval: named entities recognition and classification, co-reference resolution, etc. 
• Librarian and information science: controlled vocabularies and classification schemes, indexing techniques, metadata vocabularies. 
• Computer science: design applications to organize and retrieve.