Call for Presentations and participation at NKOS Workshop at ECDL2004, September 12 - 17, 2004, Bath, UK

User-centred approaches to Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS)

The NKOS Workshop will take place on September 16, as part of ECDL2004 in Bath, UK. The workshop is based around the theme of user-centred approaches to Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS). It builds on the previous NKOS Workshop 2000 in Lisbon and NKOS Workshop 2003 in Trondheim. 

Proposals are invited for presentations (20 minutes) on work or projects related to the themes of the workshop. See below for list of indicative topics and tentative schedule of the Workshop. Proposals on theoretical or methodological issues as well as presentations of models and applications are welcome. Proposals should include title, presenter(s) and affiliation(s), and description of presentation (500 words). Presentations from the Workshop may be selected for consideration in a special issue of the Journal New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia planned for 2005. 

Background

Knowledge Organization Systems, such as classifications, gazetteers, lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri, attempt to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain. Although, the choice of terminology in well-designed KOS should be based on ‘user warrant’, user-centred approaches have not been an explicit focus for NKOS workshops to date. This theme, however, underlies several issues and is key to achieving the full potential of KOS in Web and digital library environments. Contemporary networked information environments often consist of a range of user discourse communities, each having specific objectives and tasks in relation to a certain topic, each generating their specific discourse and vocabulary. Providers of information resources as well as users of information services may come from diverse knowledge domains looking at the same topics and problems from different perspectives using different vocabularies. Some part of the vocabulary may be shared, some part not. Sometimes, the meaning of the shared concepts is consistent between the domains; sometimes the understanding is diverse, sometimes it converges over time.

The individual user approaches topics and vocabularies from diverse degrees of domain knowledge, varying by educational background, professional experience, and cultural and social background. Non-specialist users may not fully share and understand the specialized vocabularies. For example, one user department of a scientific corporation may know the form but not fully understand a technical or scientific concept, while another user department may understand the concept, but not all the forms or expressions used. An important objective of today’s knowledge organization systems is bridging different domains and vocabularies and assisting users, specialists as well as non-specialists, to explore and navigate these different concept spaces. 

Modern digital information systems afford more options for mapping and presenting alternative orders of information than traditional physical libraries. The digital environment offers more possibilities of presenting information from different interests and discourses. Thus, the challenge is as much intellectual as technical when we want to develop knowledge organization systems that are useful and meaningful for the end-users operating in complex, interdisciplinary knowledge domains. Addressing the following challenges is critical:

• Identifying different discourses and vocabularies existing in a particular information environment or domain. What methods may be used to gather information about differences in meaning structures, ways of organising and classifying knowledge? 

• How to define end-users for NKOS purposes? What is the basic unit of analysis: individuals, groups of individuals having similar characteristics or information seekers inside a particular context or discourse? How to define the characteristics of the users that we want to support?

• How to present KOS in a form that is understandable for the users. How to develop understandable and thorough descriptions of concepts and terms? How to show and explain relationships? The challenge is to find the appropriate level of explanation, clarity and conciseness. Innovative visualisations of KOS content may also assist.

• How to come to some consensus on standard KOS representations and service protocols?  A basic infrastructure is needed in order to compare and combine KOS, which may have different viewpoints. We need to provide protocols for networked access to a variety of vocabularies for different end users and applications.

There are different approaches to overcoming these challenges and designing systems from the users’ perspective. The objective of the workshop is to bring together diverse communities and facilitate exchange of viewpoints and ideas, to provide an opportunity for communication and coordination between various, distinctive research programmes and projects dealing with development and design of KOS. The issues discussed may range from considerations related to the role of KOS, conceptual content and design, methodological issues, and technical issues (protocols and XML-RDF technologies).

Key topics

• Methodologies for identifying and mapping discourses and vocabularies

• Definition and nature of end-users for NKOS purposes

• Display and visualization of KOS content

• Interoperability, cross-browsing and cross searching between KOS systems and services

• Cross cultural and multilingual issues

• End-user interactions with NKOS: evaluations and studies of use

• Namespaces and registries, defining core set of relationship types that have same meaning across KOS

• Distributed access and protocols

• XML/RDF standard, topic map standards, ontology standards, thesaurus standards

• Semantic Web and Semantic Grid

Provisional program

The full-day workshop aims to provide an overview of projects, research and development related to the development and design of knowledge organization systems in digital environments. 

Expected participants

• Digital library and information infrastructure developers, 

• Resource discovery service providers (search engines, directories, subject gateways, portals etc.),

• Information scientists, library, museum and archive professionals,

• Thesaurus and ontology developers,

• Standard developers in the area of terminology usage and exchange,

• Interface designers and computer scientists interested in semantic web/grid issues, topic maps, XML/RDF technologies

• Language engineering and terminology studies researchers and developers,

• Knowledge managers.

Registration and further details

ECDL2004 will handle registration for the Workshop as part of the conference registration. The workshop fee will be approximately 100 Euro. This includes coffee-breaks and lunch. See ECDL2004 web site.

Program committee 

Hanne Albrechtsen, Systems Analysis Department, Risø National Laboratory, Denmark

Stella Dextre Clarke, Information Consultant, Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, United Kingdom

Lois Delcambre, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, OGI School of Science and Engineering, OHSU, USA

Traugott Koch, NetLab, Knowledge Technologies Group, Lund University, Sweden

Dagobert Soergel, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, USA

Diane Vizine-Goetz, OCLC Research, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin OH, USA

Main contact

Marianne Lykke Nielsen
Department of Information Studies
Royal School of Library and Information Science, Aalborg Branch
Aalborg, Denmark
E-mail: mln@db.dk

Update: June 08, 2004 - Mimi Nielsen