Abstracts of posters should be submitted by August 1, 2006. (An earlier call for abstracts of full papers had a deadline of June 1, 2006.) Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words and should outline the purpose, scope, approach, findings, and implications of the research. Posters will be reviewed by the international SIG/CR Workshop program committee.

Social classification (SC) is a convenient, generic label that may be used to refer to any of a number of broadly related processes by which the resources in a collection are categorized by multiple people over an ongoing period, with the potential result that any given resource will come to be represented by a set of labels or descriptors that have been generated by different people. The specific processes in question include indexing, tagging, bookmarking, annotation, and description of kinds that may be characterized as collaborative, cooperative, distributed, dynamic, community-based, folksonomic, wikified, democratic, user-assigned, or user-generated. The mid-2000s have seen rapid growth in levels of interest in these kinds of technique for generating descriptions of resources for the purposes of discovery, access, and retrieval. Systems that provide automated support for social classification may be implemented at low cost, and are perceived to contribute to the democratization of classification by empowering people, who might otherwise remain strictly consumers of information, to become information producers.

Efforts to conduct serious evaluations of the comparative effectiveness of such systems have begun, but results are scattered and piecemeal. Compared with retrieval systems based on traditional methods -- manual or automatic -- of classifying resources, how effectively are users of SC-based systems able to find the resources that they want? What is the impact on retrieval effectiveness of systems designers' decisions to pay limited attention to traditionally important components such as vocabulary control, facet analysis, and systematic hierarchical arrangement? Current implementations of SC tend to shy away, for instance, from imposing the kind of vocabulary control on which classification schemes and thesauri are conventionally founded: proponents argue that social classifiers should be free, as far as possible, to supply precisely those class labels that they believe will be useful to searchers in the future, whether or not those labels have proven useful in the past. But do the advantages that are potentially to be gained from allowing classifiers free rein in the choice of labels outweigh those that may be obtainable by imposing some form of vocabulary and authority control, by offering browsing-based interfaces to hierarchically structured vocabularies, by establishing and complying with policies for the specificity and exhaustivity of sets of labels, and/or by other devices that are designed to improve classifier--searcher consistency?

Other questions arise as a result of the reliance of SC-based systems on volunteer labor. Given the distributed nature of SC, for example, how can it be ensured that every resource attracts a critical mass of descriptors, rather than just the potentially-quirky choices of a small number of volunteers? Given the self-selection of classifiers, how can it be ensured that they are motivated to supply class labels that they would expect other searchers to use? In general, are reductions in the costs of classification (borne by information producers) achieved only at the expense of increases in the costs of resource discovery (borne by consumers)?

The workshop will be held on NOVEMBER 4, 2006, as part of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in Austin, TX. It will be the 17th in a series of annual workshops organized by ASIS&T's Special Interest Group on Classification Research (SIG/CR). Please see http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/am06call.html for further general information about the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, and http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~klabarre/SIGCR.html for further information about SIG/CR.

Abstracts of posters should be submitted to both workshop co-chairs by email (see below) by August 1, 2006. Authors will be notified of the program committee's decision by September 1, 2006. PDF copies of the final versions of abstracts should then be submitted to both workshop co-chairs by September 15, 2006. Posters will be presented on November 4, 2006.

Joseph T. Tennis, PhD

Assistant Professor

Coordinator for the MAS and MLIS First Nations Concentration

School of Library, Archival and Information Studies

The University of British Columbia

301 - 6190 Agronomy Road

Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3

CANADA

phone: 1.604.822.2431

fax: 1.604.822.6006

[log in to unmask]

http://www.slais.ubc.ca/PEOPLE/faculty/tennis-p/index.htm