Theories are needed

In everyday life we use many kinds of KO systems without reflecting about it. We quickly browse menus in a pizzeria or services on a government website without paying attention to the fact that they are sorted by some principle: pizzas may be listed by increasing price, by ingredients or in alphabetical order; public services may be ordered according to the different life stages (services for children, for occupations, for old people and so on) or by the offices and departments dealing with them.

A famous book on information architecture (Krug, 2014) is titled Don't Make Me Think! It represents a view common among interface designers: users should not waste their time in understanding which KO principles have been adopted, but should use them in intuitive ways to quickly get to the content they need. This is correct from a functional viewpoint. After all, we do not need to know how a watch works before acquiring the only information relevant to us: what time it is.

However, as we are now considering KO we have to delve into its mechanisms. Think of those watches with transparent cases that were once fashionable, allowing one to see their mechanisms while providing time information remained their main function. Why not offer knowledge organized in effective ways, and at the same time allow curious users to peer into the mechanism and understand how and why is it organized in those ways?

The mechanisms of KO are its structuring principles and devices, which we will treat in the next chapter, while the theories that inform them are the topic of this chapter. Like the watch mechanism, theories and devices are often nonexplicit. Still, they exist and are necessary, because any way of organizing knowledge implies some theory of knowledge and its structures.

Clare Beghtol, an important writer on KO theory, contrasted the systems developed for the retrieval of already available knowledge, which are based on explicit principles developed by experts in KO, with the ‘naive’ systems that organize new knowledge and are developed by people with no particular interest in KO (Beghtol, 2003). Hjørland and Nicolaisen (2004) replied to this that the contrast is only apparent, because even ‘naive’ systems are based on some principle. No system can be truly atheoretical (Hjørland, 2016).