We hereby invite you to participate in our
Special Workshop on
NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION SYSTEMS (NKOS):
European initiatives and projects / options for global co-operation
20 September 2000
It is part of:
ECDL2000
European Conference on Digital Libraries
Lisbon, Portugal, 18 - 20 September 2000
(http://www.bn.pt/org/agenda/ecdl2000/)
**Early registration for ECDL 2000 is open until July 17**
The workshop is part of the main conference program and does not
require any separate registration or payment.
The homepage for the NKOS workshop at ECDL is at:
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/ECDL-NKOS-final.htm
It provides more details and will be regularily updated.
Objectives
This half-day workshop aims to provide an overview of research, development and
projects related to the usage of knowledge organization systems in Internet based services
and digital libraries. These systems can comprise thesauri and other controlled lists of
keywords, ontologies, classification systems, taxonomies, clustering approaches,
dictionaries, lexical databases, concept maps/spaces, semantic road maps etc.
A second objective of the workshop is to enable and support co-operation between
European initiatives in the area of networked knowledge organization and to provide a
basis for participation in global efforts (see below for other NKOS projects) and
standardization processes.
This workshop will be a chance to reach out to a broader group of people working in the
area, to inform each other on on-going research and projects and to start discussions
about possible common goals and tasks, including organizational efforts: e.g. setting up a
regular event and communication or collaboration with global NKOS activities.
Workshop content and structure
The half-day workshop spans two conference sessions on September 20. The workshop
will start with an introduction and short statements of experience and interests from all
participants. The main content of the first session will be presentations from 4 invited
panel speakers:
OIL: The Ontology Inference Layer
Sean Bechhofer, Computer Science Department, University of Manchester, UK
http://potato.cs.man.ac.uk/seanb/
Thesaurus Mapping
Martin Doerr, Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH), Greece.
http://www.ics.forth.gr/
Report on NKOS activities in North America
Linda Hill, Alexandria Digital Library Project, University of California at Santa Barbara
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/
Having the Right Connections: The Limber Project
Ken Miller, Data Archive, University of Essex, UK
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/projects/99-11748.htm
After lunch, the second workshop session will offer an opportunity for all participants to
informally contribute position statements, research topics, project experiences and
perspectives, leading into general (or optionally small-group) discussion. The workshop
will conclude by considering options for cooperation and future activities.
To facilitate participation in the workshop, we encourage all interested participants to
email short position statements to any of the workshop organisers. These will be posted
on ECDL2000 section of the NKOS website: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/.
===
Organisers:
Martin Doerr,Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH), Greece.
Email: [log in to unmask]
Traugott Koch, NetLab, Lund University Library Development Department, Sweden
and Department of Development & IT, Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark (DTV)
Email: [log in to unmask]
Douglas Tudhope, School of Computing, University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK.
Email: [log in to unmask]
Repke de Vries, Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services, Netherlands.
Email: [log in to unmask]
Overview:
In recent years, the need for knowledge organization in Internet services supporting
resource discovery in digital libraries and related areas has been increasingly recognised.
The growth of information on the Web continues to challenge Internet searchers to locate
relevant, high quality resources. The major Web search services respond to this challenge
by increasing the size of their databases and offering more powerful searching and
ranking features. In contrast to these global search engines, many smaller, more
discriminating services are trying to improve resource discovery on the Internet by
focusing their efforts on the selection, description, and subject arrangement of high-
quality resources. The issue poses questions of pure research, but also to a very high
degree applied questions of agreement, collaboration, standardization, use and user needs.
Most quality-based services go beyond selection and also catalog or describe chosen
resources according to metadata standards such as the Dublin Core (DC). Quality-based
services also commonly provide subject access to selected resources through formal
knowledge organization structures such as a subject thesaurus, classification scheme, or
both. Beyond the insufficiencies of existing individual services, especially the big search
services, the overall resource discovery infrastructure on the Internet is not very well
developed. For example, few support tools exist for assisting users in finding the right
service to start with. Connections among subject collections are also lacking. A user who
discovers one service, e.g., about mechanical engineering, is not normally forwarded to
related topics in another service. There is no discovery architecture or linkage among
services based on subject indexing languages or domain ontologies.
Potential Workshop Topics
Digital library requirements for knowledge organization schemas:
- The need for knowledge organization in subject gateways and discovery
services,issues of application and use
- Web-based directory structures as knowledge organization systems
- Knowledge organization as support for web-based information retrieval,
query expansion, cross-language searching
- Semantic portals
Digital library requirements for knowledge based data processing:
- Knowledge organization for filtering, information extraction, summary
- Knowledge organization support for multilingual systems, natural language
processing or machine translation
- Structured result display, clustering
- End-user interactions with knowledge organization systems, evaluation and
studies of use, knowledge bases for supportive user interfaces, visualization
Digital library requirements for knowledge structuring and management:
- Suitable vocabulary structures, conceptual relationships
- Comparison between established library classification systems and home-
grown browsing structures
- Methodologies, tools and formats for the construction and maintenance of
vocabularies and for mapping between terms, classes and systems
- Frameworks for the analysis of assumptions and viewpoints underlying the
construction and application of terminology systems
- Methods for the combination and adaptation of different vocabularies
Digital library requirements for access to knowledge structures:
- Data exchange and description formats for knowledge organization systems,
the potential and limitations of XML and RDF schemas
- Handling of subject information in metadata formats
- Standards and repositories for machine-readable description of networked
knowledge organization schemas (as collections/systems)
- Interoperability, cross-browsing and cross-searching between distributed
services based on knowledge organization systems
- Distributed access to knowledge organization systems: standard solutions
and protocols for query and response, taxonomy servers
Communities involved:
NKOS: Networked Knowledge Organization Systems
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/
Works on content standard for describing networked knowledge organization systems.
Projects include development of a model for a protocol for NKOS query and response.
NKOS develops cooperation between researchers and developers creating interactive
knowledge organization systems over the web.
NKOS has held three previous workshops in the USA at ACM DL conferences.
This is the first European workshop on the topic.
IMesh: International Collaboration on Internet subject gateways
http://www.imesh.org/
The NORDIC Metadata Projects
http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/
MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) Terminology Workshop
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/
The topic is relevant to digital library, museum, archives, and cultural heritage
communities, geo-spatial research, systems for geo-referencing.
Related topics have been/are addressed in:
the EU projects for Telematics and their successors:
Aquarelle, Term-IT, DESIRE, Renardus;
LIMBER (Language Independent Metadata Browsing of European Resources)
and others;
various National Digital Library initiatives:
RDN, DEF Denmark, Finland, Netherlands etc.
various Standardization initiatives:
Electronic thesauri (NISO workshop)
Zthes Z39.50; Dublin Core Metadata Initiative; RDF Schema (W3C);
Expected participants
Digital library and information infrastructure developers
Resource discovery service providers
(search engines, directories, subject gateways, portals)
Information scientists, library, museum and archive professionals
Thesaurus and ontology developers
Standard developers in the area of terminology usage and exchange
Computer scientists, tool developers, interface designers
Knowledge managers
===
We hope to hear from you and to meet you in September in Lisbon.
Best regards,
Traugott Koch
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| TRAUGOTT KOCH, Senior librarian, Digital Library Scientist
| NETLAB, Lund Univ. Library Development Dept. and IT Dept.
| at the Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark.
| NetLab: P.O. Box 3. S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
| Tel: int+46 46 2229233 Fax: int+46 46 2223682
| E-mail: [log in to unmask]
| Personal homepage: http://www.lub.lu.se/koch.html
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
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