This paper re-examines the relationship between information and knowledge organization in the context of contemporary digital infrastructures. Rather than asking whether semantic web technologies, linked data or artificial intelligence can organize knowledge, it argues that their increasing success reveals a historical distinction that has remained largely obscured throughout the development of knowledge organization: the distinction between coordinating information and sustaining shared intelligibility.
This paper develops a conceptual and historical analysis drawing on the documentary tradition, the philosophy of information and knowledge organization theory. It reconstructs the emergence of informational rationality from early documentary practices through modern information science to contemporary computational infrastructures, engaging with the work of Blair, Otlet, Day, Hjørland, Mai, Bowker and Star, Floridi, Dreyfus and Ryle.
The analysis argues that informational rationality should be understood as a long-term epistemological trajectory through which knowledge progressively became abstracted into informational entities capable of formal representation and computational coordination. While contemporary digital infrastructures dramatically extend these capacities, they do not dissolve the distinction between informational coordination and semantic organization. Instead, they reveal that the historical purpose of knowledge institutions has never been information management as an end in itself, but the maintenance of shared intelligibility through historically situated interpretive frameworks. Informational automation therefore does not replace knowledge organization; it clarifies its distinctive epistemological contribution.
This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the history of knowledge organization by shifting attention from the documentary functions historically performed by knowledge institutions to the epistemic problem those functions enabled societies to solve. It argues that the future relevance of knowledge organization lies less in competing with computational systems at the level of information processing than in understanding the institutional conditions through which increasingly complex societies sustain shared intelligibility.
