Organizers

Extended abstract

We propose a full-day workshop of research projects and development related to next-generation Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) in digital libraries. This proposal builds on the well-attended NKOS workshops at previous ECDL, TPDL, JCDL, Dublin Core DCMI 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, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and lexical databases, 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 joint NKOS workshop at TPDL2018 / DCMI2018 will explore the potential of KOS 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 cooperation.

The workshop will also allow major projects to report results, newcomers to interact with established people in the field, while facilitating the discussions of topical issues which require consensus or coordination, including standards efforts. Thus, for example, previous workshops have seen focused discussion on early drafts of BSI and ISO KOS standards, the W3C SKOS standard, the interface between traditional library and information 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 / DCMI 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 published a special issue on Networked Knowledge Organization Systems in the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL, see Mayr et al. 2016). This special issue evolved from the 13th NKOS workshop held at the joint Digital Libraries conference 2014 in London. We are preparing a further NKOS special issue in IJDL for 2018, building on NKOS workshops at TPDL 2017 and Dublin Core 2017. We will discuss the potential for a further NKOS special issue at the proposed TPDL / DCMI 2018 workshop.

The proposed workshop will have three themes as the main focus, together with topical presentations arising from the workshop call for presentations. A particular feature of this year’s workshop will be the combination of European and US perspectives; the co-location of TPDL with DCMI facilitates the coming together of NKOS communities from the USA and Europe.

Workshop themes

1. Alignment/enrichment of metadata to existing KOS Linked Open Data. Recent years have seen an increasing trend to publication of KOS as Linked Data vocabularies. We need discussion of relevant issues and examples of KOS-driven metadata enrichment for a variety of data collection providers, including libraries, archives, museums, publishers, government agencies, international organizations, and also commercial organizations.
2. KOS alignment/interoperability. KOS alignment or terminology mapping has been playing a vital role in NKOS for many years. We will continue this theme with discussion of specific case studies.
3. Automatic KOS-based subject indexing / classification /entity-extracting is a classic KOS topic which has seen renewed interest regarding evaluation methodologies.
   
   Further timely presentations/demonstrations will be selected from the following topics in the CfP:
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 recent Knowescape workshop with its main topics of 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 and KOS
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 12^th, notification July 10^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.

Workshop proceedings will be deposited online in the CEUR workshop proceedings publication service (ISSN 1613-0073) - This way the proceedings will be permanently available and citable (digital persistent identifiers and long term preservation). After the workshop, copies of presentations will be made available on the website and via the main NKOS network website. There will also be an option for presenters to produce a short paper for publication in CEUR Proceedings of the workshop (see References).

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 management professionals

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)

Joseph A Busch is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Taxonomy Strategies. For the past 14 years Taxonomy Strategies has been guiding organizations such as Deloitte, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in developing frameworks that help improve information capture, preservation, search, retrieval, and governance. Mr. Busch has just started a new company called Semantic Staffing, a recruiting service for information management professionals. Before founding Taxonomy Strategies, Joseph Busch was:

• Vice President for Infoware at Metacode Technologies which was an early developer of commercial semantic technology applications based on latent semantic indexing (LSI) and other methods. Metacode was acquired by Interwoven in 2000.
• The Getty's Program Manager for Standards and Research Databases, including the Getty Vocabulary Program from 1993-98. The Getty began publishing the vocabulary resources as linked open data in 2014.

Mr. Busch is a Past President of the ASIS&T, and a past member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Executive Committee.
http://taxonomystrategies.com/about-us/

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:

1. EASTER which dealt with evaluation of algorithms for automated subject classification and indexing in the context of information retrieval
2. EnTag, on the potential of combining social tagging with Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Subject Headings
3. TRSS, a scoping study of terminology registries for UK further and higher education needs.

http://koraljka.info

Marjorie Hlava is President and Chief Scientist at Access Innovations, Inc. She is past president of NFAIS and past president of the ASIS&T, and the recipient of ASIS&T 1996 Watson Davis Award and the ASIS&T 2014 Award of Merit. She has also received the MIles Conrad Award from NFAIS and both the John Cotton Dana and Presidents Award from the SLA. She is the author of six books and over 200 articles, including her newest publication, The Taxobook, a three-volume collection on the history and implementation of taxonomies. She holds two U.S. patents encompassing 21 patent claims. Her research areas include furthering the productivity of content creation and the governance layer for information access through automated indexing, thesaurus development, taxonomy creation, natural language processing, machine translations, and machine aided indexing. She is a popular speaker on topics involving information organization, semantic enrichment, and taxonomy and thesaurus creation. Her latest area is inverting the cataloging process in libraries to a metadata driven methodology where MARC and OPAC are exports of a richer semantic coverage to the materials held, leading to better discovery and retrieval.

• http://www.accessinn.com/team-view/margie-hlava/
• http://www.accessintegrity.com
• Blog: http://taxodiary.com
• Blog: http://ICDTagger.com
• Twitter: @mmkhlava
• Skype: mmkhlava
• Book: https://www.amazon.com/The-Taxobook-Principles-Practices-Taxonomies/dp/1627055800

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. He is a member of the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) network and has organised or co-organised many NKOS workshops at ECDL/TPDL. 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.
https://philippmayr.github.io/

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 led 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 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/

Marcia Lei Zeng is a Professor of School of Information at Kent State University. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and an M.A. from Wuhan University in China. Her major research interests include knowledge organization systems (KOS), Linked Data, metadata, smart data and big data, database quality control, semantic technologies, and digital humanities. Her scholarly publications consist of more than 90 papers and five books, as well as over 200 national and international conference presentations and invited lectures. Her research projects have received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Fulbright Scholar Program, and other foundations. Dr. Zeng has chaired or served on committees, working groups, and executive boards for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Special Libraries Association (SLA), Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Currently she is serving as an Executive Board Member of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO).
http://marciazeng.slis.kent.edu/