Douglas Tudhope,
Hypermedia Research Unit, School of Computing,
University of Glamorgan
Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, Wales, UK
Tel +44 (0) 1443-482271
Fax +44 (0) 1443-482715
E-mail: douglas.tudhope@southwales.ac.uk
Denise Bedford, The World Bank, Washington, DC, U.S.A.
E-mail: dbedford@worldbank.org
Martin Doerr, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Greece.
E-mail: martin@csi.forth.gr
Gregory Shreve, Director, Institute for Applied Linguistics, Kent State University, USA
E-mail: gshreve@neo.rr.com
Knowledge Organisation Systems/Services (KOS), such as classifications, gazetteers, lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri model the underlying semantic structure of a domain. Embodied as (web) services, they facilitate resource discovery and retrieval. They act as semantic road maps and make possible a common orientation by indexers and future searchers (whether human or machine). A vast legacy of large multilingual vocabularies, indexed multimedia collections and indexed print collections is available. They exist in a network of practice, education, training and mechanisms for evolution.
Although contemporary KOS generally follow international standards, they cannot currently be utilised to their full potential in emerging DL and Semantic Web/Grid applications. This is due to their being designed for human inspection rather than machine processing, with tacit not explicit semantic structure. We now have the opportunity to formalise and enrich them, exploiting the infrastructure of Semantic Web languages and technologies. We are currently at a critical juncture since several standards efforts are concurrently ongoing in different KOS and national communities. One of the aims of this workshop is to facilitate and take practical steps towards coordinated standards activity. In addition to the NISO/BSI/IFLA thesaurus standards efforts, we are now at a stage where we can make practical progress on common representations (eg RDF/XML) and protocols, which are needed in different areas by ongoing projects. We are also seeing new efforts at integrating work by the terminology studies/language engineering community, with a number of new standards being developed there for practical use of KOS type information in machine (assisted) translation.
The workshop will build on the well attended 1st ECDL NKOS workshop at ECDL 2000. Progress in the distributed usage of networked knowledge organization systems and services may well provide the key to good solutions to resource discovery problems and be instrumental in dealing with the complexity of subject access to distributed digital information.
Presentations from the Workshop may be selected for consideration in a forthcoming (early 2004) JoDI (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/) special issue on NKOS themes (edited Koch, Tudhope). Download statistics show that articles from the April 2001 NKOS JoDI issue, based on the ECDL 2000 NKOS Workshop, have been among the most read/downloaded articles in JoDI.
See also the NKOS website for general background: https://nkos.dublincore.org/
The full-day workshop aims to provide an overview of projects, research and development related to the usage of knowledge organization systems in Internet based services and digital libraries. We also aim to provide a basis for participation in global efforts such as the NKOS network.
Emerging standards are a particularly important focus and a second purpose for the workshop is to provide an opportunity for communication and coordination between various European and US standards initiatives and major international projects (in part, through involvement of the US ASIST SigCR and terminology community in the workshop organisation).
A third objective is to bring together diverse communities, such as the Library and Information Science KOS tradition (and the migration of traditional KOS to new representations), Ontologies and the Semantic Web, XML-RDF technologies, Topic Maps, protocols for networked access, the growing interest in registries, integration of KOS approaches with language engineering and terminology studies.
See http://hypermedia.research.southwales.ac.uk/kos/nkos/ and https://nkos.dublincore.org/ for previous NKOS workshops and information about NKOS generally.