Information retrieval (IR) is about making systems for finding documents or information.
Knowledge organization (KO) is the field concerned with indexing, classification, and representing
documents for IR, browsing, and related processes, whether performed by humans or computers.
The field of IR is today dominated by search engines like Google. An important difference between
KO and IR as research fields is that KO attempts to reflect knowledge as depicted by contemporary
scholarship, in contrast to IR, which is based on, for example, “match” techniques, popularity
measures or personalization principles. The classification of documents in KO mostly aims at reflecting
the classification of knowledge in the sciences. Books about birds, for example, mostly reflect
(or aim at reflecting) how birds are classified in ornithology. KO therefore requires access to
the adequate subject knowledge; however, this is often characterized by disagreements. At the deepest
layer, such disagreements are based on philosophical issues best characterized as “paradigms”. No
IR technology and no system of knowledge organization can ever be neutral in relation to paradigmatic
conflicts, and therefore such philosophical problems represent the basis for the study of IR
and KO.