Organizers

Extended abstract

We propose a full-day workshop of research projects and development related to next-generation Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) in digital libraries. This proposal builds on the well-attended NKOS workshops at previous ECDL, TPDL, JCDL, Dublin Core conferences (see NKOS website for details). We expect approximately 30 attendees at this workshop. The proposal is supported by the international NKOS network, its website and discussion list. Presentations are made available on the workshop website.

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), in the form of classification systems, thesauri, lexical databases, ontologies, and taxonomies, play a crucial role in digital information management and applications generally. Carrying semantics in a well-controlled and documented way, Knowledge Organization Systems serve a variety of important functions: tools for representation and indexing of information and documents, knowledge-based support to information searchers, semantic road maps to domains and disciplines, communication tool by providing conceptual framework, and conceptual basis for knowledge based systems, e.g. automated classification systems.

Brief description of the workshop and its aims

The proposed NKOS workshop at TPDL2017 will explore the potential of Knowledge Organization Systems, such as classification systems, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and lexical databases in the context of current developments and possibilities. These tools help to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain for purposes of information retrieval, knowledge discovery, language engineering, and the semantic web. The workshop provides an opportunity to discuss projects, research and development activities, evaluation approaches, lessons learned, and research findings. A further objective is to systematically engage in discussions in common areas of interest with selected related communities and to investigate potential co-operation.

The workshop will also allow major projects to report results, newcomers to interact with established people in the field and discussion of topical issues, requiring consensus or coordination, including standards efforts, to take place. Thus previous workshops have seen focused discussion on early drafts of BSI and ISO KOS standards, the W3C SKOS standard, the interface between traditional Library Science vocabularies and Semantic Web efforts, KOS linked data, social tagging and its relation to established vocabularies, KOS metadata and the different types of KOS. The TPDL venue affords participation by KOS researchers and developers from different perspectives (reflecting the different conference threads), such as KOS design and construction, API and service developers, user oriented issues, management of KOS in registries. In 2016 we have published a special issue on Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services in the international journal IJDL (see Mayr et al. 2016). This special issue evolved from the 13th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) workshop held at the joint Digital Libraries conference 2014 in London. We plan to have a next NKOS special issue in IJDL in early 2018. Authors of accepted papers of the 15th and 16th workshop (at TPDL 2016 and Dublin Core 2016) will be invited to submit extended papers to this NKOS special issue.

The proposed workshop will have three themes as the main focus, together with topical presentations arising from the workshop call for presentations.

Workshop themes

1. KOS Alignment. KOS alignment or terminology mapping plays a vital role in NKOS for many years. This year we want to sort out the needs (use cases) of KOS alignments in the new environment of Linked Open Data. We plan to collect methodologies, best practices, guidelines and tools. This includes manual and automatic alignments.
2. KOS Linked Open Data. Recent years have seen an increasing trend to publication of KOS as Linked Data vocabularies. We need discussion of practical initiatives to link between congruent vocabularies and provide effective web services and APIs so that applications can build upon them.
3. KOS and Document Retrieval. Documents or parts of documents are nowadays not only accessible via their metadata but their abstracts and in many cases the full texts are electronically available. Thus, these documents also can be found by search engines. Given this possibility of full text search the role of classification and annotation has to be redefined. Questions like the following ones arise: can traditional knowledge organization and document annotation improve full text retrieval? Are classification, categorisation, annotation, tagging, and full text retrieval complementary, or how can they be made complementary? What should be the focus of annotation, if full text retrieval is available?
   
   Further timely presentations/demonstrations will be selected from the following topics in the call for papers:
4. KOS-based recommender systems. The suggestion of the right meaningful concepts is a mission critical phase for searchers in modern DL.
5. Observatory for Knowledge Organization Systems – following the recent Knowescape workshop with its main topics KOS provenance and versioning.
6. Meaningful Concept Display and Meaningful Visualization of KOS.
7. Standards developments.
8. Evaluation of KOS-based systems – methods and practical experience.
   
   KOS applications are a regular and important part of NKOS workshops. Example topics include:
9. KOS in e-Research metadata contexts - intersection between research data, KOS, Semantic web.
10. Social tagging. What is the role of social tagging and informal knowledge structures versus established KOS? (How) can tagging be guided and informed by KOS?
11. Users interaction with KOS in the online environment.
12. KOS and learning. What is required to use KOS effectively to convey meaning, to assist users to express their information needs to assist in sense making and learning?
13. Multilingual and Interdisciplinary KOS applications and tools.
14. Specific domains, such as environmental, medical, new application contexts, etc.

Workshop structure

An open call for papers and demonstrations (submission deadline June 19^th, notification July 19^th) will be combined with selected invitations from major projects and professional societies with an interest in this field. The workshop is planned to consist of an introduction, technical presentations, demonstrations, and a concluding directed discussion. The program committee will assist the review process as first-tier reviewers. The organisers will coordinate the process and promote the workshop through the workshop website, their various contacts and discussion lists, including the NKOS list and digital library lists.

Indicative agenda structure, covering approximately 8 hours

• Session 1: Welcome, introduction, mutual presentations (hrs 0:30)
• Session 2: Presentations on the main themes (hrs: 2:00)
• Session 3: Directed discussion emerging from the main session (hrs: 1:00)
• Session 4: Presentation and discussion of submitted papers on timely and related topics according to the CfP, including demonstrations (hrs: 2:00)
• Session 5: Directed discussion emerging from the session 4 (hrs 1:00)
• Session 6: Concluding discussion, including options for co-operation (hrs 0:30)

Supporting material for the workshop would, following standard NKOS practice, be available via the NKOS website. This would include abstracts of presentations, information on participants, list of resources, projects and plans for the workshop before the conference. After the workshop, copies of presentations will be made available on the website and via the main NKOS network website.

Program committee (to be confirmed)

Technical requirements

The usual PC and projector, 2-3 side tables for demonstrations if possible, Internet connections.

Expected participants

• Digital library and information infrastructure developers
• Resource discovery service providers (search engines, subject gateways, portals, repositories etc.)
• Metadata professionals, designers and researchers
• Information scientists, library, museum and archive professionals
• Thesaurus, taxonomy and ontology developers
• Standard developers in the area of terminology usage and exchange
• Computer scientists interested in semantic web/grid issues, linked data, topic maps, XML/RDF technologies, web engineering, peer-to-peer researchers
• User interface designers for KOS and Semantic Web applications
• Social tagging and community-based application developers and users
• Language engineering and terminology studies researchers and developers
• Knowledge managers

Previous NKOS Workshops

see http://hypermedia.research.southwales.ac.uk/kos/nkos/ and https://nkos.dublincore.org/ for previous NKOS workshops and information about NKOS generally.

Workshop organisers (short CVs)

Philipp Mayr is a deputy department head and a team leader at the GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences department Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences (WTS). He has been a visiting professor for knowledge representation at University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Department of Information Science & Engineering during 2009-2011. Philipp Mayr received his PhD in applied informetrics and information retrieval from the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University Berlin in 2009. To date, he has been awarded substantial research funding (PI, Co-PI) from national and European funding agencies. Philipp Mayr has published in top conferences and prestigious journals in the areas informetrics, information retrieval and digital libraries. His research group focuses on methods and techniques for interactive information retrieval. His research interests are interactive information retrieval, scholarly recommendation systems, non-textual ranking, bibliometric and scientometric methods, applied informetrics, science models in digital libraries, knowledge representation, semantic technologies, user studies, information behaviour and NKOS. http://www.ib.hu-berlin.de/~mayr/

Douglas Tudhope is Professor in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science, University of South Wales and leads the Hypermedia Research Group. He was PI on the AHRC funded STAR, STELLAR and SENESCHAL projects (Semantic Tools for Archaeological Resources), in collaboration with English Heritage and the preceding EPSRC funded FACET project, in collaboration with the Science Museum, investigating thesaurus-based query expansion. He leads the Linking Archaeological Data Work Package for the ARIADNE FP7 Infrastructures Project. Since 1977, he has been Editor of the journal, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. He serves as a reviewer for various journals and international programme committees. He is a member of the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) network and has organised or co-organised all 14 NKOS workshops at ECDL. He co-authored the JISC State of the Art Review on Terminology Services and Technology and the JISC Terminology Registry Scoping Study. He was a member ISO TC46/SC9/SC8 (and NISO) working group developing a new thesaurus standard (ISO 25964). http://hypermedia.research.southwales.ac.uk/kos/

Koraljka Golub is an Associate Professor at the Department of Library and Information Science, School of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University. She also serves as an adjunct at the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, Australia. For over five years in the recent past she worked as an information science researcher at UKOLN, University of Bath, United Kingdom. Koraljka is a researcher in the field of digital libraries and information retrieval. Her research has in particular focused on topics related to knowledge organization, integrating existing knowledge organization systems with social tagging and/or automated subject indexing, and evaluating resulting end-user information retrieval. She is currently running a Digital Humanities initiative at Linnaeus University, and is also exploring establishment of an iSchool at the same university. Three of her major research projects from the past are: EASTER which dealt with evaluation of algorithms for automated subject classification and indexing in the context of information retrieval; EnTag, on the potential of combining social tagging with Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Subject Headings; and TRSS, a scoping study of terminology registries for UK further and higher education needs. http://koraljka.info