Presentations from ISKO UK meeting "Agenda for Information Retrieval"

The Agenda for Information Retrieval event was organized in conjuction with the School of Library Archives and Information Studies at UCL, and was attended by 91 participants.

Three eminent speakers: Brian Vickery, Stephen Robertson and Ian Rowlands, addressed issues that have been on the information retrieval agenda from the 1950s to the era of Google. The talks were followed by a lively and stimulating discussion chaired by Stella Dextre-Clarke.

We are grateful to Conrad Taylor, co-ordinator of the BCS KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) community, for recording and photographing the event.

Presentations and recordings of the talks are now available at the event's page.

Findability - survey's shock findings

AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management) have just completed a survey on Findability to be published soon (see their press release).

The 'shock' finding is that among more than 500 businesses surveyed, "69% of respondents report that less than half of enterprise information is searchable online".

Dan Keldsen is Director of Market Intelligence at AIIM, and his blog offers an interesting discussion of these preliminary results.

We had similar findings reported back in March by Cap Gemini in their Information Opportunities Report.

How many more of these reports do we have to suffer before people realize that actively organizing knowledge and information is the only way to ensure findability? Add your weight to the argument by submitting a comment to Dan's blog, arguing the case for knowledge organization in your organization, or by commenting on this post.

Or, preferably, all three!

ISKO UK Event - Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via SKOS

We would like to invite you to the next ISKO UK event entitled Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) which will take place on 21 July 2008 at University College London.

Predictions for the Semantic Web are heavily dependent on the ability of computers to reason and communicate using controlled vocabularies. SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) development aims to bring forward these capabilities.

SKOS names a family of standards being created to express the semantic structure of controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classifications, subject headings etc.) so that they can be accessed and interpreted by programs and services. As a draft Web standard, SKOS Reference provides a data model that can be used as a vehicle for the development, use and sharing of knowledge organization systems across information sectors and within the Semantic Web framework.

Aware of the growing importance of SKOS, ISKO UK in cooperation with School of Library, Archives and Information Studies at UCL has invited a group of experts to introduce this standard, explain its status, potential and scope. Our speakers are involved in the development and application of SKOS and related standards and are hoping to provoke some interesting discussion.

Members of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group, Alistair Miles and Antoine Isaac and Bernard Vatant from Mondeca, will explain the role of SKOS in the Semantic Web, the ideas behind SKOS and the way it is intended to function. The convenor of BSI committee IDT/2/2/1 Stella Dextre Clarke and collaborators Leonard Will and Nicolas Cochard will discuss the data model of the recently developed BS 8723 standard known as DD8723-5, focusing on its relationship with SKOS and interoperability issues. Ceri Binding and Douglas Tudhope from University of Glamorgan will present their AHDS-funded Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources project, raising issues for practical applications of SKOS and SKOS-based terminology web services.

This event, the third in ISKO UK's KOnnecting KOmmunities series, promises a fascinating glimpse of the future of controlled vocabularies. No one involved or interested in the development, management or implementation of controlled vocabularies can afford to miss it. Book your place on the event's page.