Taxonomy - And let there be light

John Lindsay, Reader at Kingston University's (KU) Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics, and stalwart of the JISC Taxonomy mailing list, is presenting his annual seminar on 7th May at 1pm at KU. The seminar is entitled 'Taxonomy - And let there be light'.

John will be talking about the taxonomy of concepts, knowledge organisation and social networking. The seminar is the latest in a long series in which John offers new and challenging viewpoints on KO topics.

John's talk will be followed by an open meeting to discuss how the topic can be taken forward, and stayers-on will be expected to assist in emptying a bottle or two of wine.

Finding the CISM Campus.

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

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."

ISKO News Section - include commercial events?

I know that I am not the only one among ISKO UK's membership, but I am a member of the North American taxonomy mailing list TaxoCop. This list is primarily oriented towards the role of taxonomies (and related approaches to structuring information) in the corporate information environment. There is an associated Wiki. The list is run by Seth Earley of Earley and Associates, whose business is taxonomy building and deployment, although TaxoCop is not run as a commercial operation.

From time to time, the TaxoCop community run conference calls on specific topics. Some of these are free, but more often they cost USD50 per person (plus the call costs, of course). TaxoCop have announced such a conference call for March 28th, entitled 'Taxonomy and KM'. I am wondering if we wish to carry notices of such items in the News section on the ISKO site?

Although the TaxoCop conference calls are charged, they are not really commercial events, and may therefore qualify to appear in our News section. However, there are a number of events around the topic of taxonomies which are run as commercial events, such as the Taxonomy conferences which Ark Group (used to?) run, and the very interesting sessions at the Online Conference last November involving Joseph Busch, Jayne Dutra, Tom Reamy and others. Should we carry news items for such commercial events also, where they are relevant?

I have no wish to interfere with editorial policy for our Web site, but it seems to me that we need to clarify our position in this respect. What do other members think?

Regards,

Bob

New KO-related books from Chandos

For anyone who has not seen the latest catalogue from Chandos Publishing, it contains a number of books relevant to our field. Some are new (and even yet-to-be-published) and some have been out for a while.

Not least is the eagerly-awaited book by Patrick Lambe, "Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, knowledge and organizational effectiveness" (ISBN 1-84334-227-8).

Others include:

• Information Architecture for Information Professionals. Dr. Susan Batley.
• Knowledge, Information and the Business Process. Liz Taylor.
• Challenges of Knowledge Sharing in Practice: A Social Approach. Gunilla Widen-Wulff.
• E-Journal Invasion: A Cataloger's Guide to Survival. Helen Heinrich.
• Theory and Practice of the Dewey Decimal Classification System. Dr. M. P. Satija.
• Indexing: From Thesauri to the Semantic Web. Pierre de Keyser.
• Metadata for Digital Resources: Implementation, systems design and interoperability. Muriel Foulonneau & Jenn Riley.
• Descriptive and Subject Cataloguing: A Workbook. Dr. Jaya Raju.
• Classification in Theory and Practice. Dr. Susan Batley.

Further details available on the Chandos Web site via an author search.

Bob

Knowledge organization of solidarity, sustainability and non-violence subjects

Luis Gutirrez announces the new issue of his Newsletter
"Solidarity, Sustainability, and non-Violence".
This Newsletter contains a knowledge organization section that proposes a two-taxonomy approach in dealing with these specific subjects:
- knowledge organization taxonomy
- knowledge access taxonomy