Slides and audio recordings online - Classification & Ontology

Classification & Ontology: Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge, was the third biennial conference in a series of UDC Seminars organized by the UDC Consortium and hosted by Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

The conference took place on 19-20 September 2011 and was attended by 141 delegates from 30 countries from Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The keynote address by Patrick Hayes kick-started a two-day programme consisting of 21 talks and two poster presentations.

Excellent input from all speakers combined with a very engaged audience made this conference an important and successful event. The meeting of semantic technology specialists and classificationists, inspired many interesting discussions and gave us plenty of ideas and topics for the next UDC Seminar.

Slides and audio recordings can be accessed from the conference programme page.

Proceedings, published by Ergon can be purchased online on the conference website.

Classification & Ontology, 19-20 September, The Hague

Invitation...

CLASSIFICATION & ONTOLOGY: Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge

International UDC Seminar 2011
9-20 September, The Hague, Netherlands

VENUE: Koninklijke Bibliotheek
FEE: €200 (€170 students)

The conference fee includes the conference proceedings book published by Ergon Verlag, refreshments, reception and two lunches.

To secure your place at this event register online.

Ontology-like representations of classifications are recognized as potentially important facilitators in creating a web of linked data. The conference keynote speaker is Professor Patrick Hayes, one of the key players in the Semantic Web initiative and the development of RDF, OWL and SPARQL. His talk entitled "On being the same" will remind us of some oddities and internal inconsistencies in data found on the Web, as the Semantic web starts to take shape with the rise of linked data.

Following the keynote address we will hear a selection of speakers from the domains of web technology, ontology, knowledge organization and bibliographic classification, including Dan Brickley, Guus Schreiber, Thomas Baker, Dagobert Soergel, Roberto Poli, Ingetraut Dahlberg, Barbara Kwasnik, Rebecca Green, Michael Panzer, Marcia Zeng, Daniel Kless, Joan Mitchell, Richard Smiraglia, Vanda Broughton, Devika Madalli, Claudio Gnoli and more.

Read more in the conference Programme (linked to abstracts and speakers biographies)

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

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

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

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

PROTON - basic upper level ontology

This comes from the SKOS list. Bernard Vatant pointed towards a basic upper level ontology created within the SEKT (Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies) project (2004-2007).

The project worked on combining three core research areas: ontology management, machine learning and natural language processing.

Among other things, this project demonstrated how pre-existing knowledge in the form of a basic upper-level ontology can be used for metadata generation and as a groundwork for the overall knowledge modelling and integration strategy of a KM environment.

The PROTON ontology, itself, contains about 300 classes and 100 properties, providing coverage of the general concepts necessary for a wide range of tasks, including semantic annotation, indexing, and retrieval of documents.
Base upper-level ontology (BULO) Guidance introduces and documents the PROTON ontology.