BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group
Panel discussion, evening of 20 June 2006:
"Approaches to classification in
publishing and knowledge management"
London College of Communication;
no charge to attend
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CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE, and of the objects which
contain it such as books and journals, has a long history,
but is also a hot topic in the modern world of electronic
collections and the World Wide Web. Indeed Tim Berners-Lee
argues that the building of ontologies and software agents
that can deal with them is central to the vision of the
Semantic Web.
The subject goes by many names and has generated buzzwords
such as taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies and metadata,
but the essential arguments are pretty much the same: how
do we divide up and label the world or knowledge, does it
have a hierarchy, what do you do about knowledge objects
that seem to belong to several categories at the same time,
and who decides? Can a controlled vocabulary be generated,
and how does that help search and retrieval? How does one
reconcile the classificatory judgements of experts with the
way that the public and users see things?
Over the last year, the Electronic Publishing Specialist
Group has been sponsoring an initiative known as "KIDMM"
within the British Computer Society -- an ongoing project of
discussions about the management of knowledge and information,
data and metadata, in which people from many parts of the
BCS's Specialist Group community have become engaged.
This free evening meeting of EPSG features a panel discussion
(and debate) between four participants in the KIDMM project
who in different ways have been professionally involved in
classification for decades:
Leonard Will, former head of Library and Information
Services at the Science Museum and now a consultant
in information management.
John Lindsay, Reader in Information Systems at the
University of Kingston, who has had a lifelong
engagement with "infopolecon" -- issues of political
economy as they affect knowledge classification.
Judi Vernau, Director of Metataxis, an information
management consultancy. Judi was formerly Chief
Taxonomist for TSO, and worked on the taxonomy
for the British Computer Society's website and
other content.
Nic Holt, Technical Architect for Fujitsu's Knowledge
and Content Management Practice, and a visiting
researcher at the University of Manchester's
School of Informatics.
We have invited each of these experts to set forth what
he or she thinks is important in classifying knowledge
and information objects, and then comment on what the
others have said; following which the discussion will
be thrown open to the whole meeting.
This meeting will be preceded by a short Annual General
Meeting for the BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group.
Place:
The Main Lecture Theatre at the London College of
Communication (formerly the London College of Printing)
at Elephant and Castle, London.
Travel info and locator map here:
http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/lcc_location.htm
Timetable:
6:00 pm Tea and coffee available
6:15 EPSG Annual General Meeting
6:35 Panel discussion start
8:45 End of meeting
There is no charge for this meeting, but it would be greatly
appreciated if you would register your intention to come by
writing to Conrad Taylor, the EPSG Secretary:
[log in to unmask]
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Conrad Taylor: Information design & electronic publishing
Secretary, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (www.epsg.org.uk)
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Ann Apps. IT Specialist (Research & Development), MIMAS,
The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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