Draft of ISO 25964-1 - Now available

Draft of ISO 25964-1 "Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies. Thesauri for information retrieval”

Work has been under way since May 2008 to revise and extend the international standards for thesauri, ISO 2788 and ISO 5964. The updated content of these two standards, plus other material needed to support interoperability, will be combined in a new standard ISO 25964, as follows:

ISO 25964. Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies
Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval
Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies

Part 1, officially numbered ISO/DIS 25964-1, has been released as a draft available for public comment until the end of February 2010.

Part 1 covers monolingual and multilingual thesauri. As well as updating the entire content of ISO 2788 and ISO 5964, coverage includes:
guidelines for thesaurus management software;
a data model for monolingual and multilingual thesauri;
recommendations for exchange formats and protocols.
An XML schema for data exchange is included as an informative appendix, and is available free of charge here. Please click the “comments” link on this web page, to give your feedback on the draft schema.

The whole standard may be viewed online. You have to register on the site, but there is no charge for registration, and it is easy to submit comments on each clause, whether you are in the UK or not. Alternatively a hard copy is available from BSI at a price of £36 (just £18 for BSI members). Place your order online (where the draft is listed under an alternative number of 09/30165649 DC).

A copy of the whole draft may also be obtained from any of the national standards bodies which are members of ISO, the International Organization for Standards.

Development of the standard is managed by a Working Group known as ISO TC46/SC9/WG8, which has participants from 15 countries and is led by Stella Dextre Clarke of the UK. The Secretariat is provided by NISO (USA). WG8 is now actively working on Part 2 of the standard, which will provide guidance on mapping between vocabularies.

See official website. Further information may be found in the ASIS&T Bulletin, and in an article in the Technology Watch Report.

Conference Outputs "Classification at a Crossroads"

The International UDC Seminar 2009 entitled "Classification at a Crossroads - multiple directions to usability" took place in the Koninklijke Bibiotheek in The Hague on 29-30 October 2009.

There were 135 delegates in attendance from 32 countries.

The highlights of the conference programme include keynote addresses by Dagobert Soergel: "Illuminating chaos: using classification to harness the Web" and Dan Brickley: "Open Web standards and classification: foundations for a hybrid approach", but a number of other talks reinforced the message put forward by Dagobert and Dan in terms of the relevance of classification schemes for resource discovery and for creating a web of linked data.

Slides and mp3 recordings of these and the other twenty talks are now available from the conference website.

Recordings by Dan Brickley and Jakob Voss are also available in Slideshare and have been synchronised with their presentation slides, which colleagues may find especially interesting. Both talks contain some inspiring ideas that relate classification schemes and semantic technologies.

8th NKOS Workshop presentations available

Courtesy of Traugott Koch:

All presentations and posters from the 8th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) workshop, that took place at the ECDL conference in Corfu (Greece) on October 1st 2009, are available at the workshop website:

http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2009/programme.html

Among the topics covered are: a vocabulary bank; a SKOS encoding and web service, offering a bilingual economics thesaurus; UK projects experimenting with tag recommenders; evaluations of the information retrieval effects of a large number of pairs of mapped vocabularies; user interfaces for search term recommendation and query expansion; the development of the new thesaurus standard ISO 25964; the creation of faceted structures in a section of UDC and management issues in networked KOS as experienced with the same classification system.

A short report by Traugott Koch has been published in D-Lib Magazine.

Last call for registration: Classification at a Crossroads

Classification at a Crossroads: Multiple Directions to Usability
Internatinal UDC Seminar
The Hague, 29-30 October 2009.

The final Programme with abstracts and speakers' biographies containing a selection of 22 talks is now available.

This conference will cover a variety of topics: classification of web resources, automatic classification, relationships between thesaurus and classification, terminology services, web ontology standards, some new approaches in using or presenting classification and classification use in library networks.

The programme highlights are talks by our keynote speakers Dagobert Soergel "Illuminating the Chaos: Using Classification to Harness the Web" and Dan Brickley "Open Web Standards and Classification: Foundations for a Hybrid Approach".

A recent addition to the programme is a presentation by Stella Dextre Clarke "Providing for interoperability between thesauri and classification schemes in ISO 25964" on the new ISO standard for structured vocabularies and its approach to classification.

Ergon Verlag will exhibit and sell books from its series Advances in Knowledge Organization at a special 50% discount. All delegates are given 20% discount to Facet Publishing Titles. Both publishers contributed a number of books for a lottery draw and delegates will have a chance to win a book.

The registration for the conference will close on 20th October. To register, with an option to pay online go to http://www.udcc.org/seminar2009/php/registration.php.

CFP: Transcending Boundaries in Europe in the Period of the Belle Epoque: Organizing Knowledge, Mobilizing Networks...

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Colloguium: Transcending Boundaries in Europe in the Period of the Belle Epoque: Organizing Knowledge, Mobilizing Networks, and Effecting Social Change - Mons (Belgium), 20-21 May 2010

VENUE: Mundaneum [see: wikipedia entry on Mundaneum]

The colloquium will explore aspects of network development,information creation, organization and exchange, and related "boundary spanning" activities of individuals and institutions and the scholarly tools and techniques that this enabled them to develop during the period of the "Belle Epoque" in which the Western European world underwent extensive social, political and "epistemic" change from approximately 1880 to 1914 [read more].

Paul Otlet & Henry Lafontaine

Abstracts (in English or French) of not more than 500 words should be sent by January 31, 2010 to Prof. W Boyd Rayward (wrayward@illinois.edu).

Notification of acceptance 28 February 2010. Accepted papers must be delivered at the Colloquium in English.

ISKO UK Seminar: Records and Information Management in Transition

You are cordially invited to the next ISKO UK afternoon seminar

RECORDS AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN TRANSITION 16 September 2009 14:00-18:00 VENUE: University College London FEE: £20.00 (ISKO members and students FREE)

Good governance, accountability, transparency, freedom of information: noble aims for our society but achieving them depends on keeping, and being able to find, records of our dealings. In the largest and the smallest organizations today, systems and resources for keeping the records are feeling the strain.

To address these questions and the practical reality of today's challenges we have a team of speakers, battle-hardened from long experience as consultants and/or practitioners. They will discuss the organizational challenges at all levels, from the strategic to the intensely practical.

Facet Publishing is giving a special 20% discount on a selection of titles to participants and the chance to win a book!

To see the full programme and to book your place go to the event's website.

CFP: 8th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services (NKOS) Workshop

The 8th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services (NKOS) Workshop will take place on Thursday, 1st October 2009, as part of ECDL 2009 in Corfu (Greece).

Contributions are invited for the following topics:

• Linked data
• Models and methodologies for creation and development of KOS
• Social tagging
• KOS Interoperability
• Terminology services
• User-centred design issues
• Semantic Web
• Economic and social issues

See more details on invited topics at http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2009/.

This year's workshop invites proposals for both presentations and for posters. They should include aims, methods, and main findings in approximately 500 words for presentations and 200 words for posters. Submission deadline is the 19th June.