  It is needless to mention the (already established) overarching importance of
knowledge organization and its tried-and-tested high-quality schemes in
knowledge-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. But equally, it is also
hard to ignore that, increasingly, standalone KOSs are becoming functionally
ineffective components for such systems, given their inability to capture the
continuous facetization and drift of domains. The paper proposes a radical
re-conceptualization of KOSs as a first step to solve such an inability, and,
accordingly, contributes in the form of the following dimensions: (i) an
explicit characterization of Knowledge Organization Ecosystems (KOEs) (possibly
for the first time) and their positioning as pivotal components in realizing
sustainable knowledge-based AI solutions, (ii) as a consequence of such a novel
characterization, a first examination and characterization of KOEs as
Socio-Technical Systems (STSs), thus opening up an entirely new stream of
research in knowledge-based AI, and (iii) motivating KOEs not to be mere STSs
but STSs which are grounded in Ethics and Responsible Artificial Intelligence
cardinals from their very genesis. The paper grounds the above contributions in
relevant research literature in a distributed fashion throughout the paper, and
finally concludes by outlining the future research possibilities.
