Recordings & presentations available "Recording the Living World" (ISKO UK Event)

Slides and mp3 recordings of two talks from the ISKO March event Recording the Living World - available from the event website.

• Diane Tough "Collection description at the Natural History Museum "
• Graham Higley "Encyclopedia of Life"

Belle Époque in Europe: Organizing knowledge... , Mons (Belgium), 20-21 May 2010

Transcending Boundaries in Europe in the Period of the Belle Époque: Organizing Knowledge, Mobilizing Networks, and Effecting Social Change

VENUE: Mundaneum, Mons (Belgium), 20-21 May 2010
FEE: 70 EUR
TO REGISTER: conference website

The Belle Epoque is a turbulent period in Western European history between about 1880 and 1914 characterized by an emerging modernization in social and political organization, artistic and literary life and in the conduct and discoveries of the sciences.

Papers for 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 enabled them to develop during the period of the “Belle époque” in which the Western European world underwent extensive social, political and “epistemic” change.

PAPERS (PROGRAMME):

• Dave Muddiman: Imperialism, Trade and the Beginnings of Business Information: the Commercial Intelligence Bureau of the Imperial Institute, London, 1887-1903
• Alistair Black: An Information Management tool for the Dismantling of Internal Barries in Expanding and Internationalising Companies : The Staff Magazine in Britain before de First World War
• Heather Gaunt: Information, the archive, and the Australian colonies
• Hartman Frank: World Communication Cables and Ernst Kapp‘s Philosophy of Technology
• Volker Barth: World News Order: Structures and Conditions of International Communication, 1859-1940
• Christophe Verbruggen & Julie Carlier: The transcending advocacy network of Les Documents du Progrès (1907): a comparison of laboratories of social thought
• Noémie Goldamn: Art and Politics. The XX (1894-1914) and their transboundary cultural networks
• Wouter Van Acker: Paul Otlet and the International Sociology of Intellectual Work
• Mary Carroll & Sue Reynolds: The Great Classification Battle of 1910: A Tale of “Blunders and Bizzareries” at the Melbourne Public Library
• Damiano Matasci: Transnational Networks and School Reforms in France during the Belle Époque Period (1880-1914)
• Mary Niles Maack: From the Classified Catalog to Open Shelf Libraries: Americans in Paris
• Valérie Montens: The Royal Belgian Commission for International Exchanges: creation, organization and activities of an international artistic network (1871-1919)
• Jan Vandersmissen: How King Leopold II used Emile de Laveleye’s intellectual network for the benefit of his African project
• Françoise Levie: Punch-up at the Palais Mondial ; an analysis of the buried and contradictory tensions that came into conflict at the second Panafrican Congress in Brussels in 1921
• M. Herve Hasquin: Une Belgique avant-gardiste
• Bruno Notteboom: Paysage urbain. Louis Van der Swaelmen and the classification of the urban, rural and national problem in Préliminaires d’Art Civique
• Sophie Hochhäusl: From Mulhall to Brinton, From Number Charts to Picture Statistics
• Nader Vossoughian: Architecture, Type, and the Rethinking of the Humanist Tradition during the Belle Époque
• Geert Somsen: Uniting the World through Science: Pieter Eijkman’s World Capital in The Hague
• Jan Surman: Divided Space – Divided Science? The Variety of Boundaries in Habsburg Empire and their Influence on Science Before the First World War
• Daniel Laqua: Scientific Pacifism’ in the Belle Époque: Alfred H. Fried’s Efforts to Promote Peace across National Borders
• Markus Krajewski: Organising a Global Idiom. Esperanto, Ido and the World Auxiliary Language Movement before WWI
• Fabian de Kloe: Beyond Babel: Science and International language during the Belle Époque
• Mikel Breitenstein: Unity Through Language: BASIC English by C. K. Ogden
• Alex Csiszar: Material Practices of Unity: The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature in Action
• Paul Servais: Scientific Networks and International Congresses; Orientalists before the First World War
• Charles van den Heuvel: Transcending Networks – Transcending Classifications (1905-1935)

Recordings from the ISKO UK 2009 Conference "Content Architecture"

Recordings of a selection of talks from the ISKO UK Conference "Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources" 23-24 June 2009 are now available at the conference proceedings webpage.

The outputs published shortly after the conference contain abstracts, presentation files and papers - all available on the same webpage.

A selection of talks were edited and mp3 files are now available for the following:

• Keynote David Crystal: Semantic targeting: past, present and future
• Keynote Clifford Lynch: e-Research and new challenges in knowledge structuring


• Madi Solomon: Here comes everything
• Charles Inskip, Andy MacFarlane, Pauline Rafferty: Organising music for movies
• Ian Davis: Still digital images - the hardest things to classify and find
• Chris Town: Giving meaning to content through ontology based image retrieval
• Danny Budzak: Shoebox stories - online history in East London
• Tom Scott, Michael Smethurst: Building coherence at bbc.co.uk
• Brian Matthews et al : An evaluation of enhancing social tagging with a knowledge organization system
• Sarinder Kaur Kashmir Singh et al: Biodiversity information retrieval across networked data sets
• Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan: Semantic metadata annotation: tagging Medline abstracts for enhanced information access
• Paul Miller: Exploiting data in the cloud
• Chris Town, Karl Harrison: Large-scale grid computing for content-based image retrieval
• Marcia Zeng, Maja Žumer: Mapping FRSAD model and other abstract models
• Felix Boteram: Semantic interoperability in an international comprehensive knowledge organisation system
• Emad Khazraee et al: EIAH data model: semantic interoperability between distributed digital repositories

ISKO UK event "Recording the Living World"

30 March 2010 - 15.30-19.00

VENUE: University College London, Roberts Building, Torrington Place, WC1E 7JE

FEE: £5 (ISKO members and students FREE)

Creepy-crawlies, mammoths and lotus blossom, all have a place at the Natural History Museum. Today the data painstakingly collected over centuries by naturalists and other scientists are being liberated from their institutional archives, made available in rejuvenated catalogues
and published on the Web.

Diane Tough & Rita Dockery will talk about recent developments in the methods of collection description at the Museum whose library is one of the foremost resources for researchers in molecular biology, biodiversity, systematics, taxonomy, and the history of science, and consists of over one million books and half a million artworks.

Graham Higley will tell us about the Encyclopaedia of Life - an ambitious project that aims to build an online resource in which every species on earth will have its own web page. This international enterprise consists of five major projects: the Species Pages Group, the Biodiversity Informatics Group, the Scanning and Digitization Group, the Learning and Education Group, and the Biodiversity Synthesis Group. Together they are creating an unparalleled resource for the life sciences that covers every aspect of the study, research, recording and documentation of
living creatures.

This ISKO UK Seminar is organized in cooperation with the UCL Department for Information Studies.

To read more and to book your place go to the event page.

We look forward to seeing you on 30 March!

Professor Brian Vickery 1918 - 2009

We are very sorry to announce the death of Professor Brian Vickery on October 17th 2009, shortly after his 91st birthday.

Brian was an enormously influential figure in the field of classification and information retrieval, a powerful force in the development of faceted classification and retrieval theory, and a prolific writer and researcher throughout his life. A founder member of the Classification Research Group, he served as a practising librarian, research director at Aslib, and Director of the School of Library and Archive Studies at UCL (1973 - 1983).

He was made an honorary member of ISKO UK in 2008 to acknowledge his tremendous contribution to our field. ISKO UK members will feel privileged to have heard the masterly address he gave at the June 2008 meeting. A fuller appreciation will appear at the ISKO UK website shortly.

• Issues in Information Retrieval (June 2008) - talk recording (mp3)
• Brian Vickery's website
• In Pioneers of Information Science
  

New issue Knowledge Organization journal - 36, no 4 (2009)

Knowledge Organization, vol. 36, no. 4 (2009) has been mailed to subscribers; electronic copy is available at Ergon's ISKO-members' page.

CONTENTS

• International Society for Knowledge Organization. 12th General Assembly 2010. Agenda

Articles:

• Joseph Tennis. Three Creative Tensions in Document Interpretation Theory Set as Evidence of the Need for a Descriptive Informatics
• Elaine Ménard. Image Retrieval: A Comparative Study on the Influence of Indexing Vocabularies
• Charles van den Heuvel. Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective: The Designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for Telecommunication and Machine Readable Documentation to Organize Research and Society
  
• Yang Xu and Alain Bernard. Knowledge Organization Through Statistical Computation: A New Approach
  
• Patrick Keilty. Tabulating Queer: Space, Perversion, and Belonging
• Jay H. Bernstein. Nonknowledge: The Bibliographical Organization of Ignorance, Stupidity, Error, and Unreason: Part Two

ISKO News

• Claudio Gnoli. 4th ISKO Italy Meeting: Report
• Claudio Gnoli. IFLA Classification and Indexing Satellite Pre-Conference: Report
• Richard Smiraglia. ISKO-Canada/United States Holds Second Symposium

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.