Workshop on Networked Knowledge Organization Systems at ECDL, Call for participation

[Traugott.Koch _at__ ub2.lu.se]

We hereby invite you to participate in our

	Special Workshop on

NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION SYSTEMS (NKOS):
European initiatives and projects / options for global co-operation
20 September 2000

It is part of:
		ECDL2000
European Conference on Digital Libraries
Lisbon, Portugal, 18 - 20 September 2000
(http://www.bn.pt/org/agenda/ecdl2000/)
**Early registration for ECDL 2000 is open until July 17**

The workshop is part of the main conference program and does not 
require any separate registration or payment.


The homepage for the NKOS workshop at ECDL is at:
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/ECDL-NKOS-final.htm
It provides more details and will be regularily updated.


Objectives
This half-day workshop aims to provide an overview of research, development and 
projects related to the usage of knowledge organization systems in Internet based services 
and digital libraries. These systems can comprise thesauri and other controlled lists of 
keywords, ontologies, classification systems, taxonomies, clustering approaches, 
dictionaries, lexical databases, concept maps/spaces, semantic road maps etc. 

A second objective of the workshop is to enable and support co-operation between 
European initiatives in the area of networked knowledge organization and to provide a 
basis for participation in global efforts (see below for other NKOS projects) and 
standardization processes.

This workshop will be a chance to reach out to a broader group of people working in the 
area, to inform each other on on-going research and projects and to start discussions 
about possible common goals and tasks, including organizational efforts: e.g. setting up a 
regular event and communication or collaboration with global NKOS activities.



Workshop content and structure
The half-day workshop spans two conference sessions on September 20. The workshop 
will start with an introduction and short statements of experience and interests from all 
participants. The main content of the first session will be presentations from 4 invited 
panel speakers:

OIL: The Ontology Inference Layer
Sean Bechhofer, Computer Science Department, University of Manchester, UK
http://potato.cs.man.ac.uk/seanb/

Thesaurus Mapping
Martin Doerr,  Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH), Greece.
http://www.ics.forth.gr/

Report on NKOS activities in North America
Linda Hill, Alexandria Digital Library Project, University of California at Santa Barbara 
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/

Having the Right Connections: The Limber Project
Ken Miller, Data Archive, University of Essex, UK
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/projects/99-11748.htm

After lunch, the second workshop session will offer an opportunity for all participants to 
informally contribute position statements, research topics, project experiences and 
perspectives, leading into general (or optionally small-group) discussion. The workshop 
will conclude by considering options for cooperation and future activities.

To facilitate participation in the workshop, we encourage all interested participants to 
email short position statements to any of the workshop organisers. These will be posted 
on ECDL2000 section of the NKOS website:  http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/. 

===

Organisers:	
Martin Doerr,Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH), Greece. 
	Email: martin _at__ csi.forth.gr
Traugott Koch, NetLab, Lund University Library Development Department, Sweden
  and Department of Development & IT, Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark (DTV) 
	Email: Traugott.Koch _at__ ub2.lu.se
Douglas Tudhope, School of Computing, University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK. 
	Email: dstudhope _at__ glamorgan.ac.uk
Repke de Vries, Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services, Netherlands.
	Email: repke.de.vries _at__ niwi.knaw.nl


Overview:
In recent years, the need for knowledge organization in Internet services supporting 
resource discovery in digital libraries and related areas has been increasingly recognised. 
The growth of information on the Web continues to challenge Internet searchers to locate 
relevant, high quality resources. The major Web search services respond to this challenge 
by increasing the size of their databases and offering more powerful searching and 
ranking features.  In contrast to these global search engines, many smaller, more 
discriminating services are trying to improve resource discovery on the Internet by 
focusing their efforts on the selection, description, and subject arrangement of high-
quality resources. The issue poses questions of pure research, but also to a very high 
degree applied questions of agreement, collaboration, standardization, use and user needs. 

Most quality-based services go beyond selection and also catalog or describe chosen 
resources according to metadata standards such as the Dublin Core (DC). Quality-based 
services also commonly provide subject access to selected resources through formal 
knowledge organization structures such as a subject thesaurus, classification scheme, or 
both. Beyond the insufficiencies of existing individual services, especially the big search 
services, the overall resource discovery infrastructure on the Internet is not very well 
developed. For example, few support tools exist for assisting users in finding the right 
service to start with.  Connections among subject collections are also lacking. A user who 
discovers one service, e.g., about mechanical engineering, is not normally forwarded to 
related topics in another service. There is no discovery architecture or linkage among 
services based on subject indexing languages or domain ontologies.



Potential Workshop Topics

Digital library requirements for knowledge organization schemas:
- The need for knowledge organization in subject gateways and discovery 
  services,issues of application and use
- Web-based directory structures as knowledge organization systems 
- Knowledge organization as support for web-based information retrieval, 
  query expansion, cross-language searching
- Semantic portals

Digital library requirements for knowledge based data processing:
- Knowledge organization for filtering, information extraction, summary
- Knowledge organization support for multilingual systems, natural language 
  processing or machine translation
- Structured result display, clustering
- End-user interactions with knowledge organization systems, evaluation and 
  studies of use, knowledge bases for supportive user interfaces, visualization

Digital library requirements for knowledge structuring and management:
- Suitable vocabulary structures, conceptual relationships 
- Comparison between established library classification systems and home-
  grown browsing structures
- Methodologies, tools and formats for the construction and maintenance of 
  vocabularies and for mapping between terms, classes and systems 
- Frameworks for the analysis of assumptions and viewpoints underlying the 
  construction and application of terminology systems
- Methods for the combination and adaptation of different vocabularies

Digital library requirements for access to knowledge structures:
- Data exchange and description formats for knowledge organization systems, 
  the potential and limitations of XML and RDF schemas
- Handling of subject information in metadata formats
- Standards and repositories for machine-readable description of networked 
  knowledge organization schemas (as collections/systems)
- Interoperability, cross-browsing and cross-searching between distributed 
  services based on knowledge organization systems
- Distributed access to knowledge organization systems: standard solutions 
  and protocols for query and response, taxonomy servers


Communities involved:

NKOS: Networked Knowledge Organization Systems
   http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/
   Works on content standard for describing networked knowledge organization systems.
   Projects include development of a model for a protocol for NKOS query and response.
   NKOS develops cooperation between researchers and developers creating interactive 
   knowledge organization systems over the web. 
   NKOS has held three previous workshops in the USA at ACM DL conferences.
   This is the first European workshop on the topic. 

IMesh: International Collaboration on Internet subject gateways 
  	http://www.imesh.org/

The NORDIC Metadata Projects
	http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/

MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) Terminology Workshop
	http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/

The topic is relevant to digital library, museum, archives, and cultural heritage 
communities, geo-spatial research, systems for geo-referencing. 
Related topics have been/are addressed in:
the EU projects for Telematics and their successors: 
	Aquarelle, Term-IT, DESIRE, Renardus;
	LIMBER (Language Independent Metadata Browsing of European Resources)
	and others;
various National Digital Library initiatives: 
	RDN, DEF Denmark, Finland, Netherlands etc.
various Standardization initiatives: 
	Electronic thesauri (NISO workshop)
   	Zthes Z39.50; Dublin Core Metadata Initiative; RDF Schema (W3C);


Expected participants
 Digital library and information infrastructure developers
 Resource discovery service providers 
	(search engines, directories, subject gateways, portals)
 Information scientists, library, museum and archive professionals
 Thesaurus and ontology developers
 Standard developers in the area of terminology usage and exchange
 Computer scientists, tool developers, interface designers 
 Knowledge managers

===

We hope to hear from you and to meet you in September in Lisbon.

Best regards,
Traugott Koch

-- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| TRAUGOTT KOCH, Senior librarian, Digital Library Scientist  
|  NETLAB, Lund Univ. Library Development Dept. and IT Dept.
|  at the Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark.
| NetLab: P.O. Box 3.  S-221 00  Lund, Sweden                       
| Tel: int+46 46 2229233    Fax: int+46 46 2223682            
| E-mail: traugott.koch _at__ ub2.lu.se                             
| Personal homepage: http://www.lub.lu.se/koch.html           
+-------------------------------------------------------------+


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