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.

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.