Semantic Web Technologies

The December 2007 edition of this relatively new e-newsletter has recently been published. In November, I asked if ISKO UK members thought it worth monitoring. I am still undecided. It would be good to have your views.

Proceedings of the 17th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

In October Claudio Gnoli posted information about Proceedings of the 18th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop being available online.
Last week, last year's workshop proceedings devoted to social tagging were also nicely 'wrapped up' and presented (on dLIST). It seems that Joe Tennis is doing an excellent job as the subject editor for classification and knowledge organization in this archive - but we are also grateful to all colleagues in ASIST SG who contributed to this excellent idea:

Proceedings of the 17th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classificaiton Research Workshop, Austin, Texas, 2006 (Advances in Classification Research, Volume 17). Eds. Jonathan Furner and Joseph T. Tennis

Papers:

Jonathan Furner (2006). Social classification: Panacea or Pandora?

Xia Lin, Joan E. Beaudoin, Yen Bui, and Kaushal Desai. (2006). Exploring characteristics of social classification.

Emma Tonkin. (2006). Searching the long tail: Hidden structure in social tagging.

Toine Bogers. Willem Thoonen, and Antal van den Bosch. (2006). Expertise classification: Collaborative classification vs. automatic extraction.

Jennifer Trant. (2006). Social classification and folksonomy in art museums: Early data from the steve.museum tagger prototype.

Martha Kellogg Smith. (2006). Viewer tagging in art museums: Comparisons to concepts and vocabularies of art museum visitors.

Megan Winget. (2006). User-defined classification on the online photo sharing site Flickr ... Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the million typing monkeys.

Melanie Feinberg. (2006). An examination of authority in social classification systems.

D. Grant Campbell. (2006). A phenomenological framework for the relationship between the Semantic Web and user-centered tagging systems.

Joseph T. Tennis. (2006). Social tagging and the next steps for indexing.

New DCMI Knowledge Management Community

A new Knowledge Management Community has been formed under the auspices of DCMI (the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) to replace the old DCMI Global Corporate Circle. The aim is to apply a "more general focus on Knowledge Management" in place of the old community's charter which was restricted to the application of Dublin Core metadata in corporate environments.

More...

Ranganathan revisited: Facets for the future

ISKOUK held its second KOKO (KOnnecting KOmmunities) event from 14:00 - 20:00 on November 5th. 2007 entitled Ranganathan Revisited: Facets for the future . The intention was to explore the current status of faceted classification from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. The event was sponsored by Factiva from Dow Jones and the venue was provided by the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London UCL). Eighty-one people attended.

S. R. Ranganathan was the Indian librarian and academic who, in the 1930s, developed the theory of faceted classification. Faceted classification is an approach to presenting and organizing knowledge based on the identification of fundamental subject categories (‘facets') that allows the combination of relevant values from one or more facets to define a compound subject with great precision.

A report of the event is available for download from the ISKO UK web site. Copies of the presentations may be downloaded and MP3 recordings will also be available shortly.

Semantic Web Technologies

Back in mid-September, I drew your attention to a new online newsletter entitled Semantic Report. The second edition of this newsletter has just been published.

Please tell us, is this something we should be paying attention to and monitoring? If so, tell us why you think it's relevant to KO. If not, tell us why not.

Dublin Core Deficiency?

This ongoing dialogue on the DC-GENERAL mailing list might be of interest to some.

The plaintiff complains that there is no obvious element in DC which can indicate that a resource is a translation of another resource. Subsequent discussion occurs around possible usage of the isVersionOf / hasVersion refinements of element Relation. During that discussion, it is suggested that 'it may be helpful to look at FRBR'.

The plaintiff responds:

I can scarcely believe that it took the Scholarly Works Application Profile, in 2006, to define a "hasTranslation" property - and even now there's no isTranslationOf to reciprocate. In all these years has no-one needed a hasTranslation property, if hasVersion isn't appropriate?

Hmmm. Does DCMES really not cater for something so basic as translations?

What's your take on this?

Bob

Proceedings of the 18th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

The special interest group on Classification Research (SIG/CR) of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) held its annual workshop a couple of weeks ago. The proceedings are available online in the DLIST open archive. They are an interesting window on what is happening in the American organization having maybe the scope closest to ISKO...

Strong UK representation at IBERSID 2007

Several ISKO UK members attended IBERSID 2007 (the XII International Conference on Information and Documentation Systems) in Zaragoza in early October. They were there to speak as well as to listen. Of 12 speakers in a day-long special session entitled Ontologies: principles and practice, five were from the UK, three of them ISKO UK members. The session was chaired by ISKO UK founder member Alan Gilchrist.

The papers presented in the ontology session were:

Ontologies: modelling and logic - Alan Flett, (Senior Consultant, TFPL)
From thesauri to ontologies: the challenges of standardisation - Stella Dextre Clarke (Information consultant)
Topic Maps: Theory and Practice - Bob Bater (ISKO UK Vice-chair & Principal Associate, InfoPlex Associates)
Semantic Web for the Public Sector - Dr. Harith Alani (University of Southampton)
The Lexical Constructional Model: the general architecture - Prof. Dr. Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (Universidad de La Rioja, Spain) & Prof. Dr. Ricardo Mairal Usón (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain)
Cognitive Linguistics and Language: Guided Ontology Construction - Prof. Dr. Tony Veale (University College Dublin, RoI)
Ontologies and the semantic web: problems and perspectives for LIS professionals - Mtro. Javier Calzada Prado (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
A descriptive algorithm for a wine tasting lexicon corpus - Dña. Margarita Goded Rambaud (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain)
Contributions for an Improvement of the Children’s Catalogue in the Public Library - Mtra. Sandra Cosme (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)

These papers are not included in the main conference proceedings, but may be published separately next year.

Only KOnnect

It seems that ISKO UK's mission is well in-tune with British Library Chief Executive Lynne Brindley's view of the future for the information profession. In her keynote speech at CILIP's Umbrella 2007 conference, she is reported (CILIP Update, 6(11) November 2007) as saying:

Cataloguers 'interbreeding' with other professional groups such as programmers and graphic designers (for example in shopping channels, and the advertising industry) means that our backroom skills have become hot! Resource discovery is the key to the future of web services - we surely must be major contributors to all this.

	Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...
	E.M. Forster, Howards End

Guardian and Observer Archives to be Digitized

In an item posted on the KOnnect blog back in August I commented on our sister group KIDMM's expression of interest in digital preservation issues and referenced the current tussle between Microsoft's OOXML format and the Open Source community's ODF as leading contenders for a preservation format. I also referred to the PDF/A format as a possible third contender, and posted a further item on this blog noting the launch of an XMP editor for PDF under Windows.

In a highly significant development, the Guardian News and Media group (GNM), publishers of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, have recently announced that they are to digitize the whole of the archives of the two newspapers. The announcement adds:

"The group says the move will ensure the preservation of the papers’ legacy as microfilm and paper archives are in danger of degrading beyond repair."

Why is this interesting? Well, firstly because there are many in the Records Management community and beyond who claim that paper and microfilm are still the preservation formats with the longest lifetime, and who scorn the suggestion that digital formats can have greater longevity. Can anyone shed any further light on this debate?

Secondly, I wonder what retrieval facilities are to be offered for the new archive; plain content-based FTR plus author & title, or something more sophisticated? We shall find out soon enough, since the archive is free to access during November.

PDF (XMP) Metadata Editor for Windows

Pound Hill Software, a developer of metadata software tools, announced in late August 2007 the release of MetaGrove Suite 1.0 for the Windows XP platform. MetaGrove is a software suite of products that provide XMP metadata capabilities to users of Adobe Creative Suite CS2, which includes the popular Adobe Acrobat (PDF) cross-platform document format.

Why should KO professionals take note? Because the PDF format - as PDF/A - is a possible contender for the archiving of digital information, and Adobe's W3C-conformant XMP metadata specification provides an extensible platform for organizing digital information to make it discoverable.

The roots of this thread lie in the growing importance of LIS (KO) skills in today's world of information glut and knowledge scarcity. This was briefly referenced in my posting to the KOnnect blog entitled 'Bringing it all Back Home', where I referenced our sister-group KIDMM’s recognition of digital preservation as an important issue.

Although current discussion of digital archiving formats tends to focus on the Microsoft OOXML / ODF contest, PDF/A allied with XMP should not be dismissed. The appearance of a sophisticated XMP editor for Windows heralds a new stage in the battle for supremacy in this important KO arena.

A brief review of Pound Hill Software's MetaGrove for Windows metadata editor will appear on ISKO UK's KOnnect blog soon.

Presentations and audio recordings - Meta Knowledge Mash-up 2007

The BCS "Knowledge, information, data and metadata management" (BCS-KIDMM) project - organized a one-day conference on 17 September 2007 entitled "Meta Knowledge Mash-up 2007: Putting information back into IT".

A Mash-up for knowledge: From an origin in Jamaican creole and the music industry, ‘mash-up’ has come to mean putting together data from different sources to produce a useful new resource. The aim of our event is to tear through the boundaries between different professional specialisms, and ‘mash-up’ the perspectives we carry from our own practice, to create something for the benefit of all.

Slideshows and audio recordings can be found at the Mash-up outputs page

Talks:

• Conrad Taylor (Electronic Publishing SG) "Introduction to the day, plus: An overview of methods of adding ‘handles and labels’ to data, information and knowledge products"
  
• Tony Rose (Infomation Retrieval SG) "Information Retrieval today: an overview of issues and methods"
  
• Tom Khazaba (SPSS) "Data Mining, Text Mining and the Predictive Enterprise"
  
• Ian Herbert (Health Informatics Forum) "Interoperability of health information, and the role of controlled vocabularies"
  
• Dan Rickman (Geospatial SG) "Geospatial information and its applications"
  
• Christopher Marsden (Victoria & Albert Museum) "The V&A’s Core Systems Integration project: Using a common data model to unify museum catalogue databases"
  
• Terry Freedman (The National Archive) "Digital preservation – what are the issues?"
  
• Leonard Will (Will Power) "Overview on subject indexing classification and thesauri"
  
• Richard Millwood (Core UK) "Enabling knowledge communities"
  

Presentations and audio recordings from the ISKO Seminar "Tools for Knowledge Organization Today"

ISKO UK Seminar Tools for Knowledge Organization Today was held on 4th September 2007 at University College London.

The Seminar exploried current developments in knowledge organization systems, standards and the work of groups in the knowledge organization field, such as Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) and British Computer Society - Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management (BCS-KIDMM).

Slideshow files and audio recordings of the talks given by Stella Dextre Clarke, Douglas Tudhope, Vanda Broughton and Conrad Taylor, are now available from the event's website

Presentations from the 6th NKOS Workshop at ECDL conference

The 6th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services (NKOS) Workshop was held at the 11th ECDL Conference, Budapest, Hungary on September 21st 2007

Slideshows are available from the Workshop's site.
The main themes of the workshop sessions were:

• Folksonomies and Social tagging


• Panel Discussion on Project ISO NP 25964: Structured vocabularies for information retrieval


• Implications of online KOS applications


• Mapping

Outputs from the past NKOS workshops and special meetings, as well as relevant NKOS related publications, are available from the NKOS website.

Tagging

From our little ISKO UK research observatory...

Colleagues following research in social tagging (collaborative tagging), folksonomies) may be interested in the series of articles by Margaret Kipp deposited in the dLIST archive:

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2007) @toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion. In Proceedings 8th Information Architecture Summit, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2007) Tagging for Health Information Organisation and Retrieval.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2007) Tagging Practices on Research Oriented Social Bookmarking Sites. In Proceedings Canadian Association for Information Science, Montreal, Quebec.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2006) Complementary or Discrete Contexts in Online Indexing: A Comparison of User, Creator and Intermediary Keywords. In Proceedings Canadian Association for Information Science, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2006) Exploring the Context of User, Creator and Intermediary Tagging.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2006) Patterns in Tagging: An Analysis of Collaborative Classification Practices in Social Bookmarking Tools.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. and Campbell, D. Grant (2006) Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems: An Examination of Tagging Practices. In Proceedings American Society for Information Science and Technology, Austin, Texas.

Semantic Web Technologies

A new online newsletter has recently been launched entitled Semantic Report. Some extracts from the corresponding web site:

"Each month SemanticReport will bring you news, interviews, analysis, presentations, case studies, white papers, and anything you tell us you are interested in receiving with regard to the broad range of technology falling under the domain of semantic technology."

"Our mission is to bring together information that helps focus on the business aspects of semantic technologies and applications. Simply stated, that means we are concerned about presenting the business application of the technology rather than the more academic information."

Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications

DC-2007: International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications “Application Profiles and their Application in Practice” took place from 27 to 31 August 2007 in Singapore.
A report on the conference by Ann Apps is available here.

DCMI has just published the online version of the DC-2007 proceedings.



Papers

• Parallel writing in East Asian languages and its representation in metadata in light of the DCMI Abstract Model (pp. 1-9) by Akira Miyazawa



• Annotation Profiles: Configuring Forms to Edit RDF (pp. 10-21) by Matthias Palmér, Fredrik Enoksson, Mikael Nilsson, Ambjörn Naeve
  
  
• Theory and Practice of Application Profile Development (pp. 43-52) by Jon Mason, Helen Galatis
  
  
• Application Profiles: Exposing and Enforcing Metadata Quality (pp. 52-62) by Diane Ileana Hillmann, Jon Phipps



• Using an Application Profile Based Service Registry (pp. 63-73) by Ann Apps



• Identifying the Identifiers (pp. 74-84) by Douglas Campbell



• Using Metadata Schema Registry as a Core Function to Enhance Usability and Reusability of Metadata Schemas (pp. 85-95) by Mitsuharu Nagamori, Shigeo Sugimoto



• Virtual Archival Exhibition System: An Authoring Tool for Developing Web-based Virtual Exhibitions (pp. 96-105) by Ruan Yang, Chennupati K. Ramaiah, Schubert Foo



• Integrating Dublin Core Metadata for Cultural Heritage Collections Using Ontologies (pp. 128-139) by Constantia Kakali, Irene Lourdi, Thomais Stasinopoulou, Lina Bountouri, Christos Papatheodorou, Martin Doerr, Manolis Gergatsoulis



• Can a System Make Novice Users Experts? Important Factors for Automatic Metadata Generation Systems (pp. 140-150) by Sueyeon Syn, Michael B. Spring

Project Reports

• SCROL Application Profile (pp. 22-29) by Steven Wan Wu, Barbara Reed, Paul Loke



• The DCMI Tools Application Profile (pp. 30-34) by Thomas Severiens, Jane Greenberg


The DRIADE Project: Phased Application Profile Development in Support of Open Science (pp. 35-42) by Jane Greenberg, Sarah Carrier, Jed Dube


• Education.au and Metadata for Events (pp. 106-115) by Pru Mitchell



• Integrating Dublin Core and Learning Object Metadata for Describing Learning Objects for Enhanced Reusability (pp. 116-122) by Abdul Halim Abdul, Abdus Sattar Chaudhy, Christopher S.G. Khoo



• Audience-Centric Taxonomy: Using taxonomies to Support Heterogeneous User Communities (pp. 123-127) by Dave Clarke, Pei Jiun Tan
  

Keywords & the e-Government Metadata Standard

Rumour has it that the use of the Subject element of the e-GMS for keywords is to be deprecated. The e-GMS v. 2 supported the use of keywords to extend the specificity of the pretty unspecific GCL in use at the time. The e-GMS v3.0 (29 April 2004) still referenced the GCL but appeared to restrict keywords to a controlled set, saying:

"These should be taken from a controlled vocabulary or list."

However, that policy seems to have been changed in the e-GMS v3.1 (29/8/2006) which says:

"Uncontrolled values (e.g. keywords from an uncontrolled list) can also be used if they will make it easier for people to find the resource."

No wonder there's confusion! Does anyone know whether there is any truth in the rumour?

Invasion of the Knowledge Organizers

London, England, 22 August 2007.

The authorities in London have issued a warning that the city is likely to be hit by several swarms of Knowledge Organizers next month. The first swarm will make landfall on 4 September, when the UK Chapter of ISKO hold their half-day seminar Tools for knowledge organization today.

Disorganized knowledge workers are advised to take extra care on 12 September, when mixed swarms of knowledge managers and data managers are forecast to hit the Charing Cross area. First to arrive will be those attending the afternoon seminar of NetIKX - the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange - at the DWP in John Adam St., where Stella Dextre Clarke will be speaking on Standardising the language of information and knowledge management – the Agony and the Ecstasy.

Following in the early evening of the 12th., another swarm is expected to descend upon the British Computer Society's premises in Southampton Street for a meeting entitled Information, data and metadata: why they need to be managed. The meeting marks the launch of Keith Gordon's new book Principles of Data Management: Facilitating Information Sharing.

After a brief respite, we are warned that a further swarm is due to hit the Covent Garden area on 17 September in the form of the BCS KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) day conference KIDMM: MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007. Since this gathering comprises a number of different species which do not normally swarm together, visitors to the area are advised to be on their guard against unpredictable behaviour.

So, make sure you get these in your diary:

04 September: Tools for knowledge organization today
12 September: Standardising the language of information and knowledge management – the Agony and the Ecstasy
12 September: Information, data and metadata: why they need to be managed
17 September: KIDMM: MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007

New Developments in Faceted Search

Earley & Associates are running another TaxoCop Call on August 29 entitled New Developments in Faceted Search. Details are available on the Earley web site.

Invitation to ISKO UK Seminar "Tools for knowledge organization today"

ISKO UK invites you to a half-day seminar "Tools for knowledge organization today" to be held on 4th September 2007, in London.

This afternoon event focuses on current developments in knowledge organization systems and the work of groups in the knowledge organization field (NKOS and KIDMM). The programme will include presentations on new standards for structured vocabularies (BS 8723), and an automatic metadata generation project.

Attendance is free. To book your place email info[@t]iskouk.org

More information on programme and venue are on the seminar's webpage.

We are looking forward to seeing you at this event.

More Collaborative Searching?

I reproduce below a recent posting to the ona-prac listserv, announcing the beta version of a new collaborative search engine. It seems to me that it does much the same as swicki, but perhaps someone with a bit more time at their disposal would like to investigate and comment?

>>>>>

From: David Wilson
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 2:16 PM
Subject: AntStorm now in beta release

Hello Friends –

I’m writing to let you know about a nifty new Web search engine called AntStorm. AntStorm has set out to improve the Web search experience and simultaneously funnel a ton of money into the non-profits and charities that
are making our world a better place. The basic notion is to apply the editorial capacity of the global community to the search problem. The site is in beta release and will go live later this year.

Here is a good description of the company:
http://beta.antstorm.com/whatisantstorm.html

And here is a good example of “trail”:
http://beta.antstorm.com/PHEV--Pluggable-Hybrid-Electric-Vehicle-582.html

Please take a look around the site and use it a little. We’d love for you to create a trail or two of your own. Fifteen percent of the revenue generated by your trails will benefit our beta charities – listed at http://beta.antstorm.com/corp/charities.html. Please tell us what you think – good or bad – with an email to support at antstorm.com. It’ll help us know where we’re strong and what we need to improve. And please feel free
to forward this email along to your friends so they learn about the site and can also contribute content and feedback.

Thanks, and I hope you are well and happy!

<<<<<

Bob Bater

Folksologies: de-idealizing ontologies

I just stumbled across an interesting item in a blog which looks at the folksonomy/taxonomy debate from a somewhat different angle. It references Clay Shirky's grumpy indictment of formal taxonomy Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, and contains a passing mention of librarians 'puking' on emergent ontologies. However, read on, because it goes on to propose a way of disambiguating the homonyms which are bound to creep into social tagging practices (using URIs) and suggests that this will keep both the 'Lakoff-ians' (his term) and the librarians happy.

Folksologies: de-idealizing ontologies

CFP - Tenth International ISKO Conference, Montreal 5-8 Aug 2008

Official Call for Papers is now open for:

10th biennial International ISKO Conference "Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organization"
5-8 August 2008

The conference is organised and hosted by the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal.

The proposed research topics include:
­

Epistemological Foundations in KO
­ Models and Methods
­ Systems and Tools ­ Ethics
­ KO for Libraries, Archives, and Museums
­ Non-Textual Materials
­ KO in Multilingual Environments
­ Users and Social Context
­ Discourse Communities and KO
­ KO for Information Management and Retrieval
­ Evaluation

Types of Contributions Accepted: research papers, posters, and workshop proposals. See detailed instructions here

Important Dates
­ Abstract submission, deadline: November 9th 2007.
­ Notification of acceptance of paper submissions: December 14th 2007.
­ Notification of acceptance of posters: January 18th 2008.
­ Camera ready papers due in MS Word/RTF format: 1st March 2008.


Contact: isko2008@gmail.com

Where to publish?

An interesting and useful service is now made available to authors from Lund University (courtesy of Håkan Carlsson).

"Journal Info service gives fast and simple access to journal information: general, accessibility, cost (quality and each area is supported by a number of relevant points). You can e.g. find in which databases a journal is indexed, how much it costs for the library to subscribe and which alternative OA journals exists. A total of 18,000 journals are currently supported in the database."

Library and information science area, for instance, covers 319 titles. When checking "quality" one can see databases indexing the journal, journal eigenfactor, article influence, FRIDA score and ISI impact factor (available to Journal Citation Report subscribers).
One can also check what are alternative titles with open access.

Survey: The use of Dublin Core and MARC

Resoum Kidane (Bibliographic Services, King's College London) conducts a survey concerning the use of Dublin Core (DC) and MARC amongst cataloguers and other information professionals.

The main aim of this research is to obtain a perception from cataloguers and other information professionals, concerning the future trends in cataloguing. As the future of MARC becomes the subject of debate amongst information professionals, there is a possibility that DC will replace MARC for cataloguing both digital and print documents.

Colleagues working with DC or MARC are kindly invited to help by answering the following questionnaire and sending it to rkidane@talk21.com

3rd ISKO Italy meeting

courtesy of Claudio Gnoli:

More than 40 people attended the 3rd ISKO Italy meeting on 22 June in Milan. (University of Milano Bicocca Library).
The morning had an international flavour, as it was reconnected to the trends observed by Mela Bosch at the ISKO Spain conference recently held in Leon, showing an increase in the hermeneutic approach over the heuristic one, and especially to the Leon manifesto [http://www.iskoi.org/ilc/leon.htm]. This was promoted by Rick Szostak in his guest keynote address, concerning his proposal of non-disciplinary classification based on phenomena, theories, and methods.

Melissa Tiberi and Barbara De Santis developed on their current research concerning semantics problems in equivalence relationships, and Cristiana Bettella (whose introduction was read by Caterina Barazia) on her one about humanistic knowledge, focusing on the double role played in it by the researcher.

The afternoon was devoted to KO applications, starting with the experience of two university libraries (Milan Bicocca and Turin), with contribution of a third one in the discussion (Milan 1), in the use of KOSs to organize digital resources and links in the university webspace.

Two emerging, promising domains of KO application were introduced by Paolo Franzese: semantic indexing of institutional archives, and by the DesignNet team: information visualization, exemplified in an impressive solution for thesauri. Finally, Andrea Marchitelli discussed hybridizations of social tagging and blogging with opacs, and Jiri Pika showed UDC-based search techniques in a Swiss multilingual opac.

Programme (with presentation files, abstracts) and photos will be available in the next few days from the event's webpage .

Press release: North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization

Courtesy of Joe Tennis:

The first symposium North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization took place at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, on 14-15 June 2007. There were forty participants. Researchers contributed papers and posters, and delivered presentations over 2 days (to mention only a few R. Green, M. Kipp, K. La Barre, R. Smiraglia, J. Tennis)
The group resolved to form a North American chapter of ISKO, and are moving forward with that plan.

Papers are available in the dLIST archive.
Pictures from this event are available here .

Knowledge Cafes in Liverpool

Peter Bond, an expert on communities of practice, is organising regular Knowledge Cafes in central Liverpool at the Ship and Mitre pub, which is situated at the museum end of Dale Street, near John Moores University. The first KCafe is on Tuesday 26th June (6pm for a 6.30pm start, until 9pm).

(From Talking KM, which also has more details)

Planet Cataloging

After a busy fortnight, I've been catching up on my C&I postings this afternoon, and just wanted to share with you my top link for the day, Planet Cataloging.

"An automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer Lang and Kevin S. Clarke," its blogroll is impressive, and I'm sure it's going to be useful for anyone interested in keeping up-to-date with what the catalogue-blogging community is saying - in the library sector and beyond.

I've posted a couple of drawbacks and caveats on C&I Blog, and I hope you won't mind my just linking to the post there for anyone who's interested, rather than repeat posting here.

The Business of Knowing

Just wanted to draw your attention to Helen Nicol's relatively new blog The Business of Knowing.

Helen works for Connecting for Health and is just completing an MEd that examined the use of shared blogging among programme managers in the NHS. She's got a wealth of references on how people learn and share - how they go about "the business of knowing" - that may be of interest to those of us involved in organising knowledge.

In particular, there's a great live strand on Enterprise 2.0: same problem, different platforms that includes some useful stuff on tagging and how this is "A skill in itself if tags are to be meaningful for all."

Records Management Society Conference, Brighton, 30 April

On 30 April 2007, I attended the first day of the 10th Annual Conference of the Records Management Society of Great Britain (RMS), in Brighton. Although I have been a member of the RMS for several years, this was the first conference I had been to. I must say, it was one of the most vibrant and stimulating conferences I have attended for some time.

The term 'Records Manager' may not conjure up a vibrant and stimulating image in most people's minds, but the worldly job title belies not only its hidden fascinations, but also its increasing importance to both public and private sector organisations today. Although I was there just for the one day as a speaker rather than a delegate - and so did not get to attend any of the main presentations - mingling with the delegates in the exhibition hall at coffee breaks was enough to convey an impression of real professional commitment and intense interest in the practical problems which RM presents.

I am sure few would disagree that organisations which provide products and services to the consumer should be accountable, not only for the quality of those products and services, but also for ensuring that the way in which they are generated or manufactured and delivered, should be ethical, legal, non-exploitative and conducive to socio-economic health and well-being. In a nutshell, that's what RM is about, and RM practitioners do not shirk that responsibility even though it is far from easy to achieve in practice.

Once they have determined what needs to be treated as a record of organisational activity (not easy with the gigabytes comprising most organisations' daily information traffic), one of the things Records Managers need to do, is to classify each record in a number of ways. Retention class determines how long a record should be kept; equally important is classifying a record by each Function > Activity > Transaction which generates it or uses it. That's needed so that if any question of the propriety of organisational behaviour should arise, then a full audit trail of the record, from creation to destruction, may be retrieved and presented as evidence.

Managing knowledge at this intense level of detail may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Records Managers approach it with a sense of duty which one can only hope to see matched at some point in other areas of an organisation.

I was there - with three other speakers in my session - to argue a specific viewpoint on the topic 'Is classification is necessary'. The idea was to stimulate thought and discussion on what the role of classification is in RM terms. Although no hard-and-fast conclusions were reached, at least the participants were exposed to a range of different perspectives and, hopefully, felt better-enabled to make up their own mids what the answer to such a question might be.

I certainly found it an enjoyable exercise, and the final plenary of the delegate groups involved seemed to agree, to the extent that the RMS plans to run a similar session again at next year's conference. Further details are available on the RMS site.

A tag too far?

For those ISKO UK members who don't subscribe to the BCS KIDMM mailing list, I would recommend that you watch a video of David Weinberger (co-author of 'The Cluetrain Manifesto'; author of 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined'; and now of 'Everything is Miscellaneous') In summary, Weinberger is one of the most respected commentators on the new paradigms brought to us by the Web. This interesting videocast is brought to ISKO UK courtesy of Conrad Taylor of KIDMM, who in turn received the link from Dave Crossland.

Why should you watch? Because Weinberger discusses Web 2.0, the transition occurring from the Web as a centralised publish-subscribe model to a fully networked model, taxonomies, folksonomies and faceted navigation. Be warned! Some of Weinberger's views may appear, to dyed-in-the-wool KO classicists, at least challenging, at most heretical!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592&q=type%3Agoogle+engEDU

Enjoy it.

clipped from www.everythingismiscellaneous.com Peter Morville: [The opening:] “…David Weinberger’s mesmerizing new book about organization, authority, and knowledge. I received my advance copy last week and read it in a single day. I found it interesting and inspiring, and I recommend it highly. But, I don’t agree that everything is or will be or should be miscellaneous, and I don’t believe David is entirely fair to librarians, information architects, and other professional organizers.”

Study report: "Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education"

Report of a study into the use of Web 2.0 technologies for content creation for learning and teaching in Higher Education, funded by JISC, and carried out between March and May 2007 - is now available here.

"It draws on existing studies, interviews with staff at universities who have implemented Web 2.0 technologies for learning and teaching, and a week-long web based seminar (webinar) with expert contributions, both from speakers and the audience. The report builds on the briefing documents that were written especially for the webinar and the results of the webinar discussions, many of which can be
found in the Moodle site that was used to support the conference."

In the Conclusion the authors (Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen) say:

"Web 2.0 will have profound implications for learners and teachers in formal, informal, work-based and lifelong education. Web 2.0 will affect how universities go about the business of education, from learning,teaching and assessment, through contact with school communities, widening participation, interfacing with industry, and maintaining contact with alumni.

However, it would be a mistake to consider Web 2.0 as the sole driver of these changes; instead Web 2.0 is just one part of the HE ecosystem. Other drivers include, for example, pressures to greater efficiency, changes in student population, and ongoing emphasis on better learning and teaching methods.

Nonetheless, Web 2.0 is, in our view, a technology with profound potentiality for inducing change in the HE sector. In this, the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration, and increased pedagogic efficiency."

Semantic Web - an interview with Tim Berners-Lee

From ZDNet.co.uk (08 Jun 2007):

David Berlind interviews Sir Tim Berners-Lee (video), the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium at the MITX (Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange) Technology Awards held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was awarded the organisation's 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award.

See also D. Berlind's item on the ZDNet blog "Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee Unplugged: Semantic Web better than APIs for data access"

NKOS discussion list moves

The NKOS (Network Knowledge Organization Systems/Services) discussion list has been moved to OCLC.

To send messages FOR DELIVERY TO THE WHOLE LIST, use
http://listserv.oclc.org/archives/nkos-l.html.

To send your first message, you will need to get a new password:

1. Go to http://listserv.oclc.org/archives/nkos-l.html.
2. Request a new password.
3. From a confirmation email, click the confirmation link to confirm.
4. Go back to http://listserv.oclc.org/archives/nkos-l.html, choose "Post to the list".
5. Use the form to compose and send your message. You may atttach files.

Press release: JISC Conference on Digital Repositories

From JISC repositories discussion list:

Excerpts from a summary of the JISC Conference on Digital Repositories held in Manchester 6 June 2007:

'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in
Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK...

'Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director [said that] JISC's Digital
Repositories programme... had given significant impetus to repository
development in the UK...

'Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation gave the first keynote
presentation on the "Repositories Roadmap"... The vision for
2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly
outputs [are] made... open access. The situation now might therefore
require us to set a more ambitious target than that of a "high
percentage"... the Web['s] role as a means of discovery and access
need[s] to be emphasised more... [C]onceptualising repositories as
websites forces us to "think about their usability, their information
architectures and their accessibility."

'Dr Keith Jeffrey of the Science and Technology Facilities Council
gave the second keynote address. The benefits of open access
repositories, he claimed, include faster "research turnaround",
improved quality for the originators of research as colleagues were
able review the research more easily, as well as improved quality for
the community in general. They also support innovation, he continued,
improve education and public engagement with science and research
and enhance an institution's standing.'

Further details of the conference, including presentations, will be available shortly.

CFP: NKOS 2007 workshop at ECDL 2007

From NKOS discussion list:

The 6th European NKOS Workshop will take place on September 21st, as part of ECDL 2007 in Budapest. It builds on the previous NKOS Workshops at ECDL 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. Proposals are invited for presentations (typically 20 minutes plus discussion time, potentially longer if the substance and importance warrant it) on work or projects related to the themes of the workshop or to NKOS more generally.

Presentations from the Workshop may be invited to submit as extended papers to the electronic peer reviewed journal: Journal of Digital Information, JoDI.

Please email proposals (approx. 500 words including aims, methods, main findings) by June 29th to Douglas Tudhope (dstudhope@glam.ac.uk). Advance indication that you intend to submit a presentation would be helpful. Proposals will be peer-reviewed by the program committee and notification of acceptance will be given by July 17th. The early registration deadline for the conference and the workshop is July 31st.

The workshop aims to address key challenges for NKOS posed by the overlapping themes of

Social tagging
Semantic Web applications and implications of KOS
Terminology for language-oriented applications
Terminology registry
Terminology services
KOS Interoperability
User-centred design issues


Other NKOS related topics can also be proposed and more details can be found on the workshop website: http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2007/. For inspiration, visit the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services.

Main Contact:
Douglas Tudhope,
Hypermedia Research Unit, Faculty of Advanced Technology,
University of Glamorgan
Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, Wales, UK
Email: dstudhope@glam.ac.uk
http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/dstudhope


Co-organisers:
Traugott Koch Max Planck Digital Library, Invalidenstr. 35, D-101 15 Berlin, Germany, traugott.koch@mpdl.mpg.de
Marianne Lykke Nielsen, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Aalborg Branch, Aalborg, Denmark, mln@db.dk

CFP Knowledge Society: new spaces for its construction, Habana, Cuba

Courtesy of María López-Huertas:

Call for papers for
"The international conference on Information "Knowledge Society: new spaces for its construction"" - INFO' 2008
21-25 April 2008
Palacio de Convenciones de La Habana, Cuba

The conference has two main purposes: an international meeting on information and an
international workshop on business intelligence and knowledge management in companies.
Organizers: El Instituto de Información Científica y Tecnológica (IDICT) del Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Medio Ambiente de la República de Cuba.

SKOS Use Cases and Requirements: Working Draft

From SKOS discussion list:

Request for Comments: SKOS Use Cases and Requirements: Working Draft

2007-05-16: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SKOS Use Cases and Requirements [1]. Knowledge organization systems, such as taxonomies,thesauri or subject heading lists, play a fundamental role in information structuring and access. These use cases and fundamental or secondary requirements will be used to guide the design of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System), a model for representing such vocabularies. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. We would greatly appreciate your comments and feedback on this Working Draft, which should be submitted to the SWD mailing list [2].
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-ucr/
[2] mailto://public-swd-wg@w3.org

JISC UK Repositories Summer School 2007, Totnes, Devon

Repositories Summer School 2007
Dartington College, Totnes, Devon

Wednesday June 27th – Friday June 29th

The JISC Repositories Support Project (RSP) is delighted to announce the launch of the UK’s first summer school for prospective and new managers of institutional and subject repositories.

This unique three day residential course will deliver a comprehensive overview of the practical challenges and solutions to effective repository implementation. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in scholarly debates on current repository theory and gain hands-on experience with repository software and tools. A range of interactive seminars, practical workshops, lectures and panel sessions will be delivered by a range of expert practitioners drawing from projects such as DAEDALUS, TARDIS, SHERPA, Repository Bridge and the RSP. These focused sessions will be supplemented by a series of networking sessions and social engagements, all of the delightful surroundings of Dartington Hall.

Automatic Analysis of Dewey Decimal Classification Notations

An interesting work on automatic decomposition of Dewey numbers has been done by Ulrike Reiner. This is a continuation of the research previously undertaken by S. Liu (1996): Decomposing DDC synthesized numbers".
Ulrike presented reported on this research at the The 31st Annual Conference of the German Classification Society on Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Applications in Freiburg, on 8th March 2007.

We hope to see the printed version of the paper titled "Automatic Analysis of Dewey Decimal Classification Notations" in the conference proceedings, as well.

An excerpt from the abstract:

"The complex DDC system (Ed. 22) allows to synthesize (to build) a huge amount of DDC notations (numbers) with the aid of instructions. Since the meaning of built DDC numbers is not obvious - especially to non-DDC experts - a computer program has been written that automatically analyzes DDC numbers. Based on Songqiao Liu’s dissertation (Liu (1997)), our program decomposes DDC notations from the main class 700 (as one of the ten main classes). In addition, our program analyzes notations from all ten classes and determines the meaning of every semantic atom contained in a built DDC notation. The extracted DDC atoms can be used for information retrieval, automatic classification, or other purposes."

Similar work on decomposition of Universal Decimal Classification numbers was reported by Gerhard Riesthuis at the International ISKO conference in 1998.:

RIESTHUIS, G. J. A. (1997) "Decomposition of complex UDC notation", Knowledge organization for information retrieval : proceedings of the Sixth International Study Conference on Classification Research, London, 16-18 June 1997. The Hague : FID, 1997. (FID 716), 139-143.

RIESTHUIS, G. J. A. (1998) "Decomposition of UDC-numbers and the text of the UDC Master Reference File", Structures and relations in knowledge organization : proceedings of the Fifth International ISKO Conference, Lille, 25-29 August 1998. Edited by W. Mustafa Elhadi, J. Maniez, S. Pollitt. Würzburg : Ergon Verlag, 1998. (Advances in knowledge organization 6), 221-228.

RIESTHUIS, G. J. A. (1998b) Zoeken met woorden. [doctoral thesis]. Amsterdam : Leerstoelgroep Boek-, Archief- en Informatiewetenschap, 1998. (BBI-reeks nr 6).

RIESTHUIS, G. J. A. (1999) "Searching with words : re-use of subject indexing", Extensions & Corrections to the UDC, 21 1999, 24-32.

A Chinese Project: Research and Implementation of Knowledge Organizing System Integration & Service Architecture

The project, Research and Implementation of Knowledge Organizing System Integration & Service Architecture with funds of RMB 8.4million (about 0.7 million UK pound) supported by the state, is one of the projects catalogued in the Key Technologies R&D Program of Chinese 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-2009) in China. It aims to dynamically improve the knowledge organization system (KOS) in the key filed of engineering technologies, to establish the system for multi-domain thesaurus integration, dynamically maintenance and services of semantic tools, such as open classification schema, thesaurus and ontology. The KOS Integration & Service Architecture as an infrastructure will provide a supporting semantic services for information resources processing.
This research project includes construction of integrated vocabulary resources, development of semantic tools, construction of semantic services system and some fundamental research of S&T domain ontology etc. The construction of integrated vocabulary resources means the construction and maintenance of multi-domain engineering and technological thesaurus; development of semantic tools means the development of assistant tool for classification/thesaurus system; construction of semantic services system means research on integration system of KOS framework and implementation of services system. Fundamental research means acquisition and reasoning research on S&T domain ontology.
At present, about 30 full-time researchers, led by the principal of Qiao Xiaodong, are working on this research project. Institute of Scientific & Technical Information of China (ISTIC) is responsible for the research project. ISTIC is the organizing and coordinating institution for Chinese Subject Thesaurus, a comprehensive searches tool for science and technology, which embodies 81,198 subject items, including 68,823 formal subject items and 12,375 informal subject items. Chinese Subject Thesaurus is the leading tool for subject indexing, subject searches, catalogue organizing and indexing. In recent years, ISTIC is responsible for lots of high-level national scientific research programs in the aspect of knowledge organizing system. ISTIC, in 2006, was responsible for Automatic Mapping Research of Information Resources Category on the Basis of Governmental Affair Ontology, one of the programs for the National Natural Science Foundation, which mainly consists of the construction of governmental affair ontology and the research of automatic mapping among multi-categories of governmental affair information resources. Besides, ISTIC has completed the Logic Semantic Expression & Calculation Model Research on Natural Language Processing (2002-2004) for the National Natural Science Foundation and accomplished its own projects, Automatic Construction of Ontology on the Basis of Text and Design and Accomplishment of Managing System of Language Materials on Knowledge Acquisition. These programs help ISTIC form a stable group of intelligent and skillful researchers and develop technological reserves for the present project.

The North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, June 14-15, 2007

From ISKO-l and ISKOI lists:

Greetings Knowledge Organization researchers:

North American thinkers have commented on a number of changes and innovations in Knowledge Organization research. Beghtol, Mai, Smiraglia, and Svenonius have all noted a shift in knowledge organization research strategies and focus in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The task of laying the groundwork for future work is
imminent.

Likewise, the time is ripe for enhanced communication among Knowledge Organization researchers in North America. We are a diverse set of researchers interested in asking basic and applied questions on how knowledge is organized and how such organization can be improved through research. As ISKO members we are also are interested informing a North American chapter in order to share research findings, mentor students and maintain continuous conversations across the large landmass of North America.

That is why we invite you to Toronto, Ontario for the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, June 14 and 15, 2007.

Programme, registration, and accommodation information available:
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/iskona/events.html

Classaurus

Courtesy of F. J. Devadason.

An article explaining the concept and construction of a 'classaurus' is now available online:
"Online construction of alphabetic classaurus: a vocabulary control and indexing tool" by F. J. Devadason (the online version of the article published in Processing and Management, Vol. 21(1985); No.1; p 11-26)

The term 'classaurus' in the meaning of an indexing language/tool that combines classification and thesaurus is first introduced by Bhattacharyya:

BHATTACHARYYA, G. (1982) "Classaurus : its fundamentals, design and use", Universal classification : subject analysis and ordering systems : proceeding of the 4th International Study Conference on Classification Research, 6th Annual Conference of Gesellshaft für Klassifikation, Augsburg, 28 June - 2 July 1982 : Vol. 1. Edited by I. Dahlberg. Frankfurt : Indeks Verlag, 1982, 139-148.

The idea is similar to the one of thesaurofacet introduced earlier by J. Aitchison ("The thesaurofacet : a multipurpose retrieval language tool", Journal of Documentation, 26 (3) 1970, 187-203).

Many thanks to F. J. Devadason for making the text of his article available in this way. It would be great if we would get wider access (subject to copyright permission) to excellent articles by his teacher and mentor G. Bhattacharyya such as the one mentioned above or at least one of the following:

BHATTACHARYYA, G. (1979) "Fundamentals of subject indexing languages", Ordering systems for global information networks : proceedings of the Third International Study Conference on Classification Research held at Bombay, India, during 6-11 January 1975. Edited by A. Neelameghan. Bangalore : DRTC : FID/CR and Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, 1979. (FID 533), 83-99.

BHATTACHARYYA, G.; RANGANATHAN, S. R. (1978) "From knowledge classification to library classification", Conceptual basis of the classification of knowledge : proceedings of the Ottawa Conference, October 1st to 5th 1971. Edited by J. A. Wojciechowski. New York; München; Paris : K.G. Saur, 1978. 119-143.

CFP: XII Conference on Information and Documentation Systems, October 2007, Zaragoza, Spain

From ISKO-l mailing list:

The XII Conference on Information and Documentation Systems (IBERSID 2007, 1-4 October 2007, Zaragoza, Spain) is open for contributions in English to the special meeting on "Ontologies for information retrieval" (3-4 October 2007). It is entitled: "Ontologies: principles and practice. A challenge and an opportunity for the information and knowledge professional communities". Invitation is open for long/short papers,posters or proposals for workshops.
Deadline for proposals is 31 May 2007.
Notification for acceptance 4 June 2007.
Full paper are expected by 30 June 2007.

The programme and conference information are available at http://www.ibersid.org. The preliminary programmme for the special "Ontologies for information retrieval" meeting is available at:
http://cicic.unizar.es/ibersid_en/Ediciones/Ibersid2007/programaEN.htm

ISKO Theme: Social Tagging

Clipmarked by RJB

clipped from www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk Tags Networks Narrative, an "Interdisciplinary application of experimental social software to the study of narrative in digital contexts" is a unique speculative project exploring the potential for collaborative keyword tagging (folksonomy) in narrative research. We want to know: What kinds of collaborative social network tools are available for the gathering and classification of information? Which researchers are making online narratives the focus of study, and how are those projects categorised by discipline? How can these researchers make effective use of social network tools to share knowledge and develop interdisciplinary collaborations? The project is based in the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De Montfort University and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board from October 2006-September 2007. The Project Team comprises Professor Sue Thomas, Simon Mills and Bruce Mason.

10th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 13-16 June, Uppsala

From jisc-repositories mailing list:

Call for participation at: 10th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD2007): "Added Value for E-theses", Uppsala, Sweden, June 13-16, 2007


This meeting offers scope for an exchange of experience and consolidation of cooperation in the field of electronic theses and dissertations at local, national and international levels.

Under the general theme "Added Value for E-theses", ETD 2007 is organised around two main themes: "Integrating ETDs with institutional processes and practices" and "Value added services". The themes of the conference call for reflection on opportunities for joint effort amongst various players in the production and information chain, both inside and outside our universities.

To allow the specific developments relating to ETDs to be considered in context, we are delighted to welcome a number of excellent speakers including: Gregory Crane, Tufts University, USA; Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information, USA and Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University, UK.

For more information about the speakers and the conference in general, please see the programme.

The reduced fee for early registration is available until 3rd May.

Records Management Society Conference, Brighton, 29 April - 1 May 2007

ISKO UK members may be interested to know that I am participating in an experimental collaborative session at the Records Management Society Conference in Brighton on Monday 30 April. I am one of four presenters who will present, in turn, to four groups of 15 people on the topic: Is Classification necessary? If you follow the link above, you will see that each of the presenters is taking a quite different approach to the topic. When all four groups have heard what each of the four presenters have to say, a plenary session will be held to report and discuss the responses.

This is an interesting experiment by the RMS-GB to get their members more actively involved in debate about current issues in knowledge and information management. I will report in this Blog on how the experiment goes in due course.

Report from the 8th ISKO Spain conference and proposal of the "León manifesto"

Courtesy of Claudio Gnoli.

The 8th Conference of the ISKO Spain , held on 18-20 April 2007 in León was devoted to "Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in the organization of scientific knowledge".
Some relevant proposals regarding the future of knowledge organization emerged during the conference and were summarised by Claudio Gnoli and Rick Szostak as "León manifesto":

• the current trend towards an increasingly interdisciplinarity of knowledge calls for essentially new knowledge organization systems (KOS), based on a substantive revision of the principles underlying the traditional discipline-based KOS;


• this innovation is not only desirable, but also feasible, and should be implemented by actually developing some new KOS;


• instead of disciplines, the basic unity of the new KOS should be phenomena of the real world as it is represented in human knowledge;


• the new KOS should allow users to shift from one perspective or viewpoint to another, thus reflecting the multidimensional nature of complex thought. In particular, it should allow them to search independently for particular phenomena, for particular theories about phenomena (and about relations between phenomena), and for particular methods of investigation;


• the connections between phenomena, those between phenomena and the theories studying them, and those between phenomena and the methods to investigate them, can be expressed and managed by analytico-synthetic techniques already developed in faceted classification.

To comment and discuss on this manifesto, to subscribe to it, or to propose collaboration, please write to Claudio Gnoli and Rick Szostak.

A full illustration of the issues discussed in León is available here.

Facet analysis and Semantic Web: Musing of a student of Ranganathan

From Jan Wyllie clipmarks

clipped from www.geocities.com Librarians knew well that to be successful, at least three important tools are needed for an information system of the type they were handling. They are: Data element directory (Cataloging Manual) Classification Scheme (unfortunately in the West only monolithic, enumerative, voluminous variety was known, unlike in India where classification scheme was almost synonymous with faceted classification scheme) for categorization of the documents; and Thesaurus (vocabulary control tool) for consistent indexing (assigning index terms) that complemented the pitfalls of the enumerative classification scheme in not being capable of representing the subject of the document coextensively and completely, and brought in the faceted model as it was a compilation of uni-terms standing for uni-concepts. [Prof. Fugmann has cautioned about the pitfalls of using thesaurus alone for information retrieval

CFP - 1st Symposium on Knowledge Organization, 27-29 August 2007, Ciudad de Mexico

From ISKO Italy mailing list:

The University Centre for Library Science Research at the University of Mexico invites contributions for the

1st International Symposium on knowledge organization: Library science and terminology

27-29 August 2007
CUIB UNAM, Ciudad de Mexico

(see complete text of invitation)

OBJECTIVE
To exchange experiences, points of view and results of studies conducted
by scholars specialized in either of these subjects on any aspect of
scientific communication, understanding that this has direct relevance to knowledge organization within information systems.


CONTRIBUTIONS
If you’d like to make a presentation, please read the complete call for papers in PDF format at http://cuib.unam.mx/Convocatoria_1er_Simposio.pdf
All proposals will be submitted to an academic evaluation committee.
Deadline for submission of the proposals: 15 May 2007.

Summaries of the paper proposals should be sent to simposio2007@cuib.unam.mx

We urge you again to read the full call for papers, and also to pass it on to friends and colleagues in your own community of interest.

On behalf of the organizing committee
Dr Catalina Naumis Pena
Dr Filiberto Felipe Martinez Arellano

Approaches to Knowledge Organization by Birger Hjørland

Courtesy of Maria Teresa Biagetti:

Presentation of the talk by Birger Hjørland on "Approaches to Knowledge Organization (KO)" at the School for Archivists and Librarians, University of Rome "La Sapienza", on 20 April 2007 is available at http://w3.uniroma1.it/ssab/new/ApproachesToKO.zip

"I believe the best way to prepare students for the future in KO is to provide a critical review of approaches available and cooperate in the discipline to establish the best possible theoretical ground for evaluating existing technologies and providing excellent KO.

I have tried to demonstrate that approaches are associated with theories of knowledge such as positivism, rationalism, empiricism, pragmatism and post-modernism. I believe that debate and further study of the approaches mentioned (as well as new ones) is urgent." [from the presentation conclusion]

CFP - Special issue of Library Review

Submissions are sought for a special issue of Library Review on the topic of 'Digital libraries and the Semantic Web: context, applications and
research'.

This special themed issue of Library Review consolidates similarly themed conferences (e.g. the International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries - ICSD-2007) and aims to demonstrate the relevance and application of Semantic Web technologies to digital libraries, repositories, and the LIS community generally.

Submissions may comprise research papers, evaluation, case studies, and descriptions of innovative projects, theoretical expositions, or reviews.
For further submission details see: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/LibraryReview/

Presentations on Dublin Core from Metadata and Digital Repository SIG

Sent to CETIS-METADATA mailing list by Neil Fegen.
The most recent meeting (16 May 2007) of the JISC Metadata and Digital Repository SIG focused on Dublin Core work. Most presentation files (slides and audio where available) are available from this page, alongside a summary of each presentation.
Speakers were Pete Johnston (on DC abstract model and DC-LOM mapping), Julie Allinson (on DC application profile for scholarly work), Rosemary Russell (on UK DCMI affiliate work), Sarah Currier (on DC-Ed and Rob Tice (on Becta Vocabulary Management Services).

KM/IM Conferences Back-to-back

I notice that two premium events are happening back-to-back in London this year. The first - Knowledge & Content UK 2007, 26-27 June - is largely concerned perhaps with what some regard as more 'touchy-feely' issues like promoting a knowledge sharing culture and organizational learning, although the Content Management stream does sail fairly close to our territory with themes like Navigation vs. search: addressing the entire scope of information access needs.

If you've not had enough of listening and networking at KC-UK, then you can spend the next two days, 28-29 June at the HENRY STEWART XVIII Conference, (formerly known as the Digital Asset Management & Marketing Operations Management Symposium). Don't be put off by either the old or new title though - there are some nuggets of real interest to ISKO members.

One such is What you Need to Know About Taxonomies & Metadata, Madi Solomon (formerly of Disney), 14:20 - 15:00 on 29 June. Another is the Executive Roundtable: Professional Media Managers vs. Social Networking & Tagging, 11:00 - 12:20 on June 29. I'd really have liked to attend that last one, if only because one of the panel members is the Managing Director of my local media centre in Bristol, The Watershed (I was there last night!). But at GBP 599 for the two days and no day visitor tariff, I'm afraid I'll have to give it a miss this time round.

Architecture of Conversation - presentation at IA Summit

Andrew Hinton's presentation "Architecture of Conversation" at the Information Architecture Summit 2007, addresses some very relevant issues in knowledge organization. Here is the description from the author's blog inkblurt:

“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” – Cory Doctorow

How can Information Architecture address the increasing demand for collaborative work, meaningful conversation and social connection? We’ll explore how “Community of Practice” is more than just a 90s knowledge-management buzz-phrase. It’s an important model for understanding group behavior – and one that’s becoming crucial to designing in the age of Wikipedia, MySpace and YouTube.

Understanding communities of practice as a phenomenon can lend a great deal of clarity to designing frameworks for participation: creating the right conditions for particular kinds of collective effort.

We’ll gain an essential understanding of “communities of practice,” looking at “IA” as a handy example. We’ll then examine how the concept helps us design for a variety of collaborative environments – from intranets and medical forums to multiplayer games.

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication - broadcast

From Joanne Yeomans on behalf of the OAI5 Organising Committee:

"The main proceedings of the OAI5 - CERN Workshop on Innovations
in Scholarly Communication will be broadcast on the web as video file
attachments in the programme.

A file for each session in the main auditorium should appear approximately 10 minutes after the end of the presentation. The first such session takes place on Wednesday afternoon (tomorrow) and then on Thursday during most of the day and Friday morning.

We hope that many of you will join us virtually to watch. Already many participants have arrived ready for the start of events tonight. Messages to participants can be sent to oaiworkshop-organisation@cern.ch."

Functional Requirements for Authority Data - draft now available for review

From the IFLA CLASS list:
The IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) is pleased to announce that a 2nd draft of "Functional Requirements for Authority Data" (previously titled "Functional Requirements for Authority Records") is now available for worldwide review.
This draft, updated in response to comments received during the previous review, is on the IFLA web site at http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm. Comments should be sent by July 15, 2007 to:

Glenn Patton
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
6565 Kilgour Place
Dublin OH 43017-3395
Phone: +1.800.848.5878, ext. 6371 or +1.614.764.6371
Fax: +1.614.718.7187
Email: pattong@oclc.org

CFP - First International Workshop on "Digital Libraries Foundations"

Call for Papers:
First International Workshop on "Digital Libraries Foundations", Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 23, 2007.
In conjunction with ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2007).
The workshop will bring together researchers involved in laying the foundations for the digital library research field. In particular, it will make it possible for them to discuss and explore their solutions in the context of a Reference Model for Digital Libraries. The workshop will engage the international digital library community in producing a reference framework wherein new results can be integrated, compared, and discussed - leveraging prior work on the definition of a Reference Model for Digital Libraries launched by the EU DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries.

The future of subject analysis - discussion list

From the IFLA CLASS list:

The ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section Subject Analysis Committee would like to invite you to subscribe to the list http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/headings to discuss the future of subject analysis.

The ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee established a new SAC Subcommittee on the Future of Subject Headings at ALA Annual 2006. Its charge:

"To analyze the future of subject cataloging, with emphasis on Library of Congress subject Headings (LCSH), through the use of SWOT (Strengths,Weaknesses, opportunities, and Threats) analysis, taking into consideration both internal forces within the library community and the external environment. A preliminary report will be made at Midwinter 2008 with the final report and program made at Annual 2008. "

Your participation in this discussion would be most welcome.

Teleconference "Taxonomy & Metadata Jumpstart - 2007"

A series of free webinars on Thursdays, April 5 - 26th 1:00-2:30pm EST (18:00-19:30 BST) via teleconference.
"Taxonomy & Metadata Jumpstart - 2007"

"Get up to speed quickly on what you need to know about taxonomies and learn how to get started on a taxonomy project in your organization in this free 4-week webinar series. The Taxonomy & Metadata JumpStart will tackle some of the issues and challenges in deriving taxonomies and metadata standards. During these calls, you will hear from experts at leading Fortune 500 companies and be exposed to tools from select vendors."

Attendees receive a Powerpoint file in advance of each call, and will have the opportunity to ask questions of the speakers and interact with others in the audience.

Ontology Summit 2007

Ontology Summit 2007 - Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions. This event doesn't seem to be listed on the Links page on the ISKO UK web site. The survey contained on this page is now closed, but a glance through the introductory text tells me that the Knowledge Engineering community is looking to expand its horizons and maybe talk to others involved in related fields. An aim, it seems, not dissimilar to our own.

I for one, look forward to seeing the results of this survey, if indeed it is published outside the conference itself. Do any ISKO UK members have connections with this community?

Bob

Teleconference roundtable "Bridging the gap between folksonomies and taxonomies"

Link courtesy of Jan Wyllie:

A roundtable on 17 May 11:00 am - 2:00 pm (Eastern), 8:00 am - 11:00 am (Pacific) via teleconference
Bridging the gap between folksonomies and taxonomies"


"Is it possible to combine the creativity of "social tagging" with the rigor of professional document indexing? In this teleconference roundtable, Bradley Allen will do a joint presentation with Rafael Sidi of Elsevier Engineering Information about a system that lets metadata managers associate author-generated keywords with terms in a controlled vocabulary and lets users use the results for search."

Study on tagging behaviour on Flickr

Pauline Rafferty and Rob Hidderley are currently working on a small scale study of tagging behaviour on Flickr, using Jakobson’s model of communicative functions as a framework through which to analyse the empirical data. The aim of the project is to determine whether tags assigned to images are informational in function, or appear to be operating in respect to other communicative functions.

Pauline is an ISKO UK member and we hope to hear more about this study at the next ISKO UK open meeting in September.