ABSTRACT
Ontologies are part of a wider family of systems called knowledge organization systems (KOS).
Hodge, in Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority Files (Hodge, 2000), defines KOS as ‘all types of schemes for organizing information and promoting knowledge management’. The author provides a taxonomy of KOS, with the following three top-level groups, listed in order of complexity and expressiveness:
1. Term lists, which include controlled vocabularies, glossaries, dictionaries and gazetteers, are lists of terms, often with definitions.
