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

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.