Call for Participation
The NKOS@TPDL 2026 workshop will be held at the 30th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2026), 22–25 September 2026, in Faro, Portugal. This in-person workshop draws on the long-standing contributions of the NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems) workshop series in advancing research in Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and the pivotal role of the TPDL conference in shaping the digital libraries landscape.
The NKOS workshop series has, for over two decades, provided a dedicated forum for the international KOS research and practitioner community, exploring the potential of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the context of current and emerging information landscapes and technological advances. It offers a space where KOS researchers and practitioners from different perspectives and interdisciplinary backgrounds can engage together.
Objectives
The workshop has the following objectives:
- To explore the current and future potential of KOS in the context of AI, Linked Data, and multilingual knowledge representation.
- To provide an opportunity to discuss ongoing projects, research and development activities, evaluation approaches, and research findings.
- To enable major projects to report results and allow newcomers to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the field.
- To facilitate discussion on topical issues requiring consensus or coordination, including standards efforts.
- To engage with related communities including those working on information retrieval, Semantic Web technologies, digital humanities, and AI, and investigate potential collaboration.
- To identify emerging research agendas at the intersection of KOS and contemporary AI-powered information systems.
Workshop Themes and Topics
The workshop has two primary themes as its main focus:
Theme 1: KOS Mappings and Alignment
Mappings (or alignment) between KOS is attracting increasing attention in the context of KOS as Linked Data and multilingual archives. This theme includes the use of generative AI as a tool for KOS mapping, exploring its methods, capabilities, and limitations through practical experience.
Theme 2: User Interaction with KOS in Retrieval
This theme addresses how users interact with KOS in information retrieval contexts, including semantic search, interface design, and the user-facing implications of KOS-powered systems.
Further presentations and demonstrations will be selected from the following additional topics:
- Automatic/AI KOS-based subject indexing, classification, and entity extraction
- KOS-based recommender systems
- Meaningful concept display and visualisation of KOS
- Semantic standards developments (including BSI, ISO, W3C SKOS, and related)
- Evaluation of KOS-based systems — methods and practical experience
- KOS in e-research and metadata contexts
- KOS and e-learning
- Use of KOS in generative AI applications — methods and practical experience
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: 19th June 2026
- Notification of acceptance: 17th July 2026
- Deadlines are AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
Proposal Submission
Proposals are invited for 20-minute presentations and demos or 60-minute panels on work related to the themes of the workshop (above). We welcome presentations, demos and panels related to themes, in-process projects, and ongoing work.
Please submit proposals (maximum 1000 words including aims, methods, background, main findings, and relevance to themes of workshop) on
EasyChair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nkostpdl2026
Proposals will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee.
Participation in in-person workshop will require registration; please consult the TPDL 2026 website for registration and cost information. After the workshop, copies the presentations will be made available on the NKOS website.
Papers developed from some earlier workshop presentations were published as special issues in journals such as Journal of Data and Information Science and Knowledge Organization. In case of interest, we shall aim for special journal issue to host papers from the 2026 workshop.
Program Committee
- Co-Chairs
- Andreas VLACHIDIS (a.vlachidis@ucl.ac.uk || webpage) University College London, UK
- Claudio GNOLI (claudio.gnoli@unipv.it|| webpage) University of Pavia, Italy
- Koraljka GOLUB (koraljka.golub@lnu.se|| webpage) Linnaeus University, Sweden
- Joseph BUSCH (jbusch@taxonomystrategies.com || webpage) Taxonomy Strategies, USA
- Douglas TUDHOPE (douglas.tudhope@southwales.ac.uk || webpage) University of South Wales, UK
- Marcia ZENG (mzeng@kent.edu || webpage) Kent State University, USA
- Program Committee Members
- Mark BUTLER (mhbutler@gmail.com) University of California, Berkeley & OntoAI Inc., USA
- Antoine ISAAC (antoine.isaac@europeana.eu) Europeana and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Vânia Mara Alves LIMA (vamal@usp.br) University of São Paolo, Brazil
- Eva MENDEZ (emendez@bib.uc3m.es) Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
- Ziyoung PARK 朴志英 (zgpark@hansung.ac.kr) Hansung University, South Korea
- Jian QIN (jqin@syr.edu) Syracuse University, USA
- Armando STELLATO (stellato@uniroma2.it) University of Rome, Italy
- Joseph TENNIS (jtennis@uw.edu) Information School, University of Washington, USA
- Marcin TRZMIELEWSKI (marcin.trzmielewski@gmail.com) Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, France
NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems) is an ad hoc work group of more than 300 international experts and implementers of knowledge organization systems. NKOS is devoted to enabling knowledge organization systems/services (KOS), such as classification systems, thesauri, gazetteers, and ontologies, as networked, interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet.
[Ref: Archive for all NKOS workshops materials (since 1997) || An archive containing details of European NKOS Workshops]
_files/cc-by.png){kind=small}
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
Back to NKOS home