Library of Congress looks to Replace MARC

A Bibliographic Framework for the Digital Age

The new bibliographic framework project will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model. The protocols and ideas behind Linked Data are natural exchange mechanisms for the Web that have found substantial resonance even beyond the cultural heritage sector. Likewise, it is expected that the use of RDF and other W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) developments will enable the integration of library data and other cultural heritage data on the Web for more expansive user access to information.

Original source. Thanks to Tom Baker of the DC Architecture list for distributing this news.

Health information

Health information is a hot topic and getting hotter following the controversial Health and Social Care Bill and the collapse of the previous government's plan to build a national health records service and IT network. Meanwhile, an ageing population on the one hand and increasingly complex scientific and medical knowledge on the other means that health information issues are going to become more and more significant for our society.

ISKO UK's next event Interoperability: joining up knowledge and information in the health sector, a half-day seminar on 1st November 2011, 14:00 - 19:00, at The King's Fund, 11-13 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0AN offers the opportunity to hear the thoughts of leading health information experts, as well as to network and meet others working in information and health professions.

For details of the speakers, the programme, and bookings, visit the event website: http://www.iskouk.org/events/health_nov2011.htm.

To follow ISKO UK on Twitter: @ISKOUK.

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.

UKeiG names Professor Alan Smeaton as the 2011 Tony Kent Strix Award winner

UKeiG is delighted to announce this year’s winner of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award.

Professor Alan Smeaton of the School of Computing, Dublin City University is a worthy winner of this prestigious award with sustained contributions in the field of natural language processing techniques for textual information retrieval as well as in the indexing and retrieval of image, audio and video data. He now leads a research team at the University of 40 researchers working in areas including life-logging, video analysis, summarization and search, data aggregation in environmental sensor networks, collaborative search techniques, data fusion from sensor networks and using sensors in media applications. He was founding director for the Centre for Digital Video Processing, a world-leading research centre for video processing and retrieval. Professor Smeaton was also the founding coordinator of TRECVid, which started as an independent evaluation exercise of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) in 2001 – an initiative that has clearly been instrumental to the progress of the field of digital video retrieval.

The presentation of the ‘Owl’ Trophy and a certificate will take place on Monday 24^th October at the Enterprise Search Europe event at the Hilton London Olympia. Martin White (UKeiG Chair), Doug Veal (Chair of the Strix Award Panel) and David Hawking, the Keynote Speaker for the opening day, will preside over the presentation. They will be joined by representatives of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award’s two sponsors: ASLIB and the Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Further information about the award, as well as a list of past winners, can be found at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix.

Defragmentation of the Information Professions

Since August 2010 there has been some discussion and debate within CILIP and some other groups about how the information professions seem to be increasingly fragmenting into different specialist interest groups with no over-arching organization to pull them together. ISKO UK has been asked to offer its opinions and possibly support for the setting up of some kind of umbrella group that could provide a unified voice for such activities as lobbying government on information issues. There is an Information Professions wikispace with more background about the discussions that have taken place so far.

What do you think about the formation of such an umbrella group? Should ISKO UK be involved or not? If ISKO UK should be involved, in what ways? Would it dilute ISKO UK's purpose to get involved, or would it be beneficial? Do you think professional fragmentation matters, or are we best served by numerous specialist groups?

ISKO UK is run by committed volunteers, not paid staff, and seeks to keep costs to members as low as possible, so becoming part of an umbrella group could be costly. On the other hand, such an umbrella group could be something that you as ISKO UK members would actively want to support as a way of promoting the information professions in general and knowledge organization work in particular.

Please tell us what you think – all comments, ideas, questions, and suggestions are appreciated. You are welcome to leave comments on this blog, to email info@iskouk.org, or to send a tweet or a DM to @ISKOUK on Twitter.

International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA)

I attended the 42nd conference of IASA in Frankfurt last week and spoke to the Organising Knowledge Task Torce. There is a lot of interest in semantic metadata and Linked Open Data in particular amongst the archival community. Some archivists are already well versed in Semantic Web techniques and technologies, others are just beginning to think about how to make their collections findable online, and others know that they have well-structured metadata in their catalogues but are not sure how best to transform these to fully digital formats.

I have written more about the conference on my blog, VocabControl.

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)