Knowledge organization for information retrieval: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Classification Research held at University College London 16-18 June 1997. (FID 716). The Hague, Netherlands: International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID), 1997. 206 pp. $A??. soft cover. ISBN 92 66 00 716 1.

The first of this series of conferences was held forty years earlier in Dorking, UK. Brian Vickery, who attended both meetings, provides a neat summing up of this one in a concluding piece. In it, he notes the re-occurrence of themes that were pursued at Dorking. These include perceived importance of classification, the effect of social conditions on the way that knowledge is structured, the relevance of facet analysis, facet sequence in the build-up of compound subjects, polyhierachy, and paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Vickery implies that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but there has been change of orientation, not least because of the influence of expert systems and of the Internet.

Mills' introductory address provides the context for the meeting. He concentrates on developments in faceted classification and their bearing on computer-based systems, and he propounds the significance of classification as an instrument of education. He also laments the disparity between what he sees as the large effort put into information retrieval research on 'microthought', and the lesser effort expended upon broader views that consider an overall structure of knowledge. These same themes are amplified in several of the conference offerings.

In addition to the contributions by Mills and Vickery, the proceedings comprise 32 papers, including four not given at the conference. The papers include case studies of existing schemes (UDC and DDC in the case of classification, and thesauri embodying multilingual and polyhierarchical components), and of Web-based categorisations. There is a balance of theoretical approaches with papers on classificatory structures, domain analysis, structured database interfaces and indexing. Ranganathan's ghost smiles benignly on proceedings.

There is recognition of the way that artificial intelligence studies have been grappling with knowledge organisation. However, the contributions from this quarter are limited. It seems that there remains a divide between the mathematical heritage of expert systems, and the pragmatic notational domain of classifiers.

Now that the business community has discovered knowledge-based systems, it is important that the knowledge organisation coteries can come together to provide substance for the hyperbole of knowledge management. On the evidence of this conference, there is still much to be accomplished.

Michael Middleton, QUT