Salatino and colleagues examine knowledge organisation systems as the semantic infrastructure through which research fields become searchable, comparable and computationally analysable. Their iconic contribution is a systematic comparison of forty-five taxonomies, thesauri, classifications and ontologies across scope, structure, curation, use and interconnection. The theoretical contribution lies in showing that disciplinary knowledge is not simply collected but actively modelled through labels, hierarchies, synonyms and associative relations. Methodologically, the survey applies explicit inclusion criteria and a common feature matrix, exposing major differences in granularity, maintenance, language coverage and interoperability. The conceptual operation is disciplinary cartography: fields are rendered as structured conceptual territories whose boundaries and internal relations support retrieval, recommendation and forecasting. The wider bridge reaches library science, scientometrics, open science and AI-assisted research. The study also reveals a structural inequality: some domains possess mature representational systems, while others remain coarsely classified or conceptually absent from machine-readable infrastructures.
