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Informetric Analyses of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs)

A knowledge organization system (KOS) is made up of concepts and semantic relations between the concepts which represent a knowledge domain terminologically. We distinguish between five approaches to KOSs: nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri, ontologies and, as a borderline case of KOSs, folksonomies. The research question of this paper is: How can we informetrically analyze the effectiveness of KOSs? Quantitative informetric measures and indicators allow for the description, for comparative analyses as well as for evaluation of KOSs and their quality. We describe the state of the art of KOS evaluation. Most of the evaluation studies found in the literature are about ontologies. We introduce measures of the structure of KOSs (e.g., groundedness, tangledness, fan-out factor, or granularity) and indicators of KOS quality (completeness, consistency, overlap, and use).