Richard Smiraglia is a Professor in the Knowledge Organization Research Group at the iSchool, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA. He has defined the meaning of "a work" empirically, and has revealed the ubiquitous phenomenon of instantiation among information objects. Recent work includes empirical analysis of social classification, and epistemological analysis of the role of authorship in bibliographic tradition. His "Idea Collider'' research team is working on a unified theory of knowledge. An Associate Researcher of the eHumanities Group, Amsterdam, he is a collaborating member of the Knowledge Space Lab effort to map the evolution of knowledge in Wikipedia. He holds a PhD (1992) from the University of Chicago. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Knowledge Organization.