Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services The 5th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop Workshop at the 10th ECDL Conference, Alicante, Spain September 21, 2006

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Call for Presentations and Participation

Workshop webpage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nkos/nkos2006/

For the fifth time, an NKOS Workshop will be arranged as official workshop of the European Digital Library Conference. This time the workshop takes place on September 21st, as part of ECDL 2006 in Alicante, Spain (http://www.ecdl2006.org/).

Proposals are invited for presentations (typically 20 minutes plus discussion time, potentially longer if the substance and importance warrant it) on work or projects related to the themes of the workshop (see below) or to NKOS more generally. The traditionally reflective style of the NKOS workshops allows plenty of time for discussion and features a briefing session for shorter communications and emergent topics.

Please email proposals (approx. 1000 words including aims, methods, main findings)

by May 11

to Traugott Koch (t.koch@ukoln.ac.uk). Advance indication that you intend to submit a presentation would be helpful. Proposals will be peer-reviewed by the program committee and notification of acceptance will be given by June 16. The early registration deadline for the conference and the workshop is July 15.

After the workshop, copies of presentations will be made available on the workshop website. Presentations from the Workshop may be invited to be submitted as extended paper to the electronic peer reviewed journal: Journal of Digital Information, JoDI (http://jodi.tamu.edu).

The workshop aims to address key challenges for KOS posed by the overlapping themes of

• User-centred design issues
• KOS Interoperability
• KOS representations and service protocols
• Terminology services
• Social tagging

However, other NKOS topics can also be proposed. For inspiration, visit the NKOS network website at: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/

A significant feature of this NKOS workshop will be a special session highlighting Semantic Web applications of KOS in Digital Libraries. This builds on Semantic Web contacts established at previous NKOS workshops at ECDL and represents a convergence of semantic Digital Library efforts from the library world and Semantic Web communities. The session will focus on theoretical and practical issues involved in building next-generation Semantic Digital Libraries that provide machine support for end-users in their search for content and information.

• Deployment of Semantic Web methods in support of Knowledge Organization systems and services

Submissions for this "Semantic Web Special Session" are invited according to the same procedures and should please be marked as such. Further details see below.

Main Contact

Traugott Koch
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK,
Phone: +44 1225 383218
Fax: +44 1225-386256
E-mail: t.koch@ukoln.ac.uk
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.koch/

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Other organisers

• Sebastian Ryszard Kruk DERI Galway, NUIG, Ireland
• Marianne Lykke Nielsen, Department of Information Studies, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Aalborg Branch, Aalborg, Denmark
• Douglas Tudhope, Hypermedia Research Unit, School of Computing, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales, UK

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Themes

Knowledge Organization Systems, such as classifications, gazetteers, lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri, attempt to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain. Modern digital information systems afford more options for mapping and presenting alternative orders of information than traditional physical libraries. The digital environment offers more possibilities of presenting information from different interests and discourses. Thus, the challenge is as much intellectual as technical when we want to develop knowledge organization systems that are useful and meaningful for the end-users operating in complex, interdisciplinary knowledge domains. The workshop would address the following general themes, although we will also remain open to emergent issues:

• User-centred design issues: User-centred design strategies for KOS. How to develop understandable and thorough descriptions of concepts and terms? How to show and explain relationships? The challenge is to find the appropriate level of explanation, clarity and conciseness. Innovative visualisations of KOS content may assist - how to achieve these in networked situations?
• KOS Interoperability: Cross-browsing and cross-searching between distributed KOS services, mapping between terms, classes and systems, mapping between KOS and ontologies. How to achieve semantic interoperability?
• KOS representations and service protocols: A basic infrastructure is needed in order to achieve programmatic access to KOS services. We need to provide protocols for networked access to a variety of vocabularies for different end users and applications. These require standard representations in formats such as RDF/XML. What is the appropriate granularity of base services to apply in evolving Web/Grid environments? Why and how is the scalable and sustainable management of KOS mappings required?
• Terminology services: We need to identify and specify terminology services for different applications, within a service-oriented approach/architecture, building on the basic infrastructure.
• Social tagging: Participative user-based approaches to knowledge organization and cataloguing are emerging and attracting significant community support. What is the role of social tagging and informal knowledge structures versus established KOS?

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Semantic Web Special Session

With the development of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), OWL Web Ontology Language and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), the W3C Semantic Web Activity promotes the deployment of technologies for expressing, exchanging and processing metadata in a form processable by machines. The Dublin Core and related vocabularies of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) represents a crucial contribution to this growing suite of standards.

The goal of the special session is to support the deployment of Semantic Web methods in support of Knowledge Organization systems and services. The assumption underlying semantic digital libraries is that full-text search cannot be the entire solution for the massively expanding information space of emerging digital libraries. Next-generation digital library systems must also be able to handle well-defined metadata describing the stored contents and provide machine support for the end users in their search for content. One crucial first step is to organize bibliographic metadata for automated interpretation by machines.

Major steps in this direction include

• Guidelines from the W3C Semantic Web Best Practice and Deployment Working Group.
• The SKOS model for expressing mappings and existing concept structures such as thesauri, taxonomies and controlled vocabularies in a Semantic-Web-enabled form.
• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, which provides specifications on expressing Semantic-Web-conformant metadata in syntax languages such as XML and RDF/XML.
• Prototypical Semantic Digital Library systems such as SIMILE, JeromeDL, and BRICKS.
• Social Networking, a technology for collaborative filtering based on community-aware annotations.
• WordNet, which organizes the vocabulary of the English language into synonym sets which are processable by machines for disambiguation.

Authors are encouraged to submit workshop contributions on these and other related topics, such as:

• Architecture and design of Semantic Digital Libraries
• Case studies and application scenarios
• Peer-to-peer solutions for interconnecting Semantic Digital Libraries
• Enhanced semantic-aware search, browsing and retrieval functionalities
• Integration of existing metadata into a Semantic Digital Library
• Enabling ontologies, thesauri, and other controlled vocabularies for the Semantic Web

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Program committee

• Hanne Albrechtsen, The Institute of Knowledge Sharing, Denmark
• Thomas Baker, SUB - Goettingen State and University Library, Germany
• Ron Davies, Information Consultant, Brussels, Belgium
• Ian Davis, Talis, Birmingham, UK
• Stefan Decker, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
• Lois Delcambre, Computer Science Department, Portland State University, USA
• Stella Dextre Clarke, Luke House, Wantage, UK
• Martin Doerr, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH), Greece
• Bernhard Haslhofer, ARC Seibersdorf Research, Studio Digital Memory Engineering, Austria
• Carlo Meghini, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Pisa, Italy
• Eva Mendez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Alistair Miles, CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
• Libby Miller, W3C, Bristol, UK
• Erich Neuhold, Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
• Axel Polleres, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
• Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland, USA
• Diane Vizine-Goetz, OCLC Research, USA
• Marcia Zeng, Kent State Univ, USA

Content by: Traugott Koch of UKOLN.
Page last revised on: 25-Sep-2006
Email comments to: web-support@ukoln.ac.uk