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ISKO Organization

ISKO's mission

Founded in 1989, ISKO is the leading international society for organization of knowledge. ISKO has a broad and interdisciplinary scope. ISKO's mission is to advance conceptual work in knowledge organization in all kinds of forms, and for all kinds of purposes, such as databases, libraries, dictionaries and the Internet.

As an interdisciplinary society, ISKO brings together professionals from many different fields. ISKO counts about 600 members all over the world, from fields such as information science, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, as well as special domains such as medical informatics.

ISKO comunity at Sao Paulo Conference, 2026

In order to achieve its mission and goals, ISKO works to:

Promote research, development and applications of knowledge organization systems that advance the philosophical, psychological and semantic approaches for ordering knowledge
Provide the means of communication and networking on knowledge organization for its members
Function as a connecting link between all institutions and national societies, working with problems related to the conceptual organization and processing of knowledge

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President Elect, President and Past President At ISKO 2026

Among ISKO's most important activities are

international conferences every two years
national and regional conferences on special topics
publication of the leading scientific journal in the field: Knowledge Organization (KO), formerly International Classification, founded in 1974
ISKO News, published in Knowledge Organization
the series Advances in Knowledge Organization (AKO)
ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization freely available online

Institutions with an interest in knowledge organization may at any time submit a proposal for hosting a future conference to the ISKO Board of Directors. Proposals should take into account ISKO's Guidelines, which provide some background on the requirements, and may be submitted to the Board by email.

ISKO's organization

ISKO was founded in Germany, and since 2020 is incorporated in Toronto, Canada.

ISKO is organized in a Board of Directors with 7 members, and a Scientific and Technical Advisory Council. Annual meetings are arranged. ISKO has a number of national or regional chapters.

The ISKO By-Laws (2020) serve as the current governing document for the organization.) Regional Chapters are governed by the ISKO General Bylaws for Regional Chapters (2023)

ISKO cooperates with international and national organizations such as UNESCO, the European Commission, and ISO (the International Organization for Standardization, including its Working Group on Terminology Extraction, ISO/TC37/SC3 - Management of Terminology Resources).

In addition, links are established to

DCMI (the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative),
IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions), in particular its Section on Subject Analysis and Access,
ASIS&T SIG/CMR (the Special Interest Group on Classification and Metadata Research of the Association for Information Science and Technology),
NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services), and
Infoterm (the International Information Centre for Terminology).

ISKO offers both individual and institutional memberships; please see the Join ISKO page for information on how to join.

ISKO has published its privacy policy.

Read further the encyclopedia article about ISKO.

International Society for Knowledge Organization is a 501(c)6 non-profit organization. Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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