[Sigcr-l] CfP: 5th European NKOS WORKSHOP at ECDL 2006, September 21, Alicante, Spain

Wed Apr 19 05:53:11 EDT 2006

                    Call for Presentations and Participation
5th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop.
ECDL 2006, 10th ECDL Conference, September 21, Alicante, Spain

                      http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nkos/nkos2006/

For the fifth time, an  NKOS Workshop will be arranged as official 
workshop of the European Digital Library Conference. This time the 
workshop takes place on September 21st, as part of ECDL 2006 in 
Alicante, Spain (http://www.ecdl2006.org/).

Proposals are invited for presentations (typically 20 minutes plus 
discussion time, potentially longer if the substance and importance 
warrant it) on work or projects related to the themes of the workshop 
(see below) or to NKOS more generally. The traditionally reflective 
style of the NKOS workshops allows plenty of time for discussion and 
features a briefing session for shorter communications and emergent topics.

Please email proposals (approx. 1000 words including aims, methods, main 
findings)

                                  by May 11

to Traugott Koch (t.koch at ukoln.ac.uk). Advance indication that you 
intend to submit a presentation would be helpful. Proposals will be 
peer-reviewed by the program committee and notification of acceptance 
will be given by June 16. The early registration deadline for the 
conference and the workshop is July 15.

After the workshop, copies of presentations will be made available on 
the workshop website.
Presentations from the Workshop may be invited to be submitted as 
extended paper to the electronic peer reviewed journal: Journal of 
Digital Information, JoDI (http://jodi.tamu.edu).

The workshop aims to address key challenges for KOS posed by the 
overlapping themes of
  * User-centred design issues
  * KOS Interoperability
  * KOS representations and service protocols
  * Terminology services
  * Social tagging

However, other NKOS topics can also be proposed. For inspiration, visit 
the NKOS network website at: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/

A significant feature of this NKOS workshop will be a special session 
highlighting Semantic Web applications of KOS in Digital Libraries. This 
builds on Semantic Web contacts established at previous NKOS workshops 
at ECDL and represents a convergence of semantic Digital Library efforts 
from the library world and Semantic Web communities. The session will 
focus on theoretical and practical issues involved in building 
next-generation Semantic Digital Libraries that provide machine support 
for end-users in their search for content and information.
  * Deployment of Semantic Web methods in support of Knowledge 
Organization systems and services

Submissions for this  "Semantic Web Special Session" are invited 
according to the same procedures and should please be marked as such. 
Further details see below.

Main Contact:

Traugott Koch
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK,
Phone: +44 1225 383218
Fax: +44 1225-386256
E-mail: t.koch at ukoln.ac.uk
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.koch/

Other organisers:

Sebastian Ryszard Kruk
DERI Galway, NUIG, Ireland

Marianne Lykke Nielsen,
Department of Information Studies, Royal School of Library and 
Information Science, Aalborg Branch, Aalborg, Denmark

Douglas Tudhope,
Hypermedia Research Unit, School of Computing,
University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales, UK

For full details visit the workshop website:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nkos/nkos2006/

Themes:

Knowledge Organization Systems, such as classifications, gazetteers, 
lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri, attempt to model 
the underlying semantic structure of a domain. 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. The workshop 
would address the following general themes, although we will also remain 
open to emergent issues:

* User-centred design issues: User-centred design strategies for KOS. 
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 assist - how to achieve 
these in networked situations?
* KOS Interoperability: Cross-browsing and cross-searching between 
distributed KOS services, mapping between terms, classes and systems, 
mapping between KOS and ontologies. How to achieve semantic 
interoperability?
* KOS representations and service protocols: A basic infrastructure is 
needed in order to achieve programmatic access to KOS services. We need 
to provide protocols for networked access to a variety of vocabularies 
for different end users and applications. These require standard 
representations in formats such as RDF/XML. What is the appropriate 
granularity of base services to apply in evolving Web/Grid environments? 
Why and how is the scalable and sustainable management of KOS mappings 
required?
* Terminology services: We need to identify and specify terminology 
services for different applications, within a service-oriented 
approach/architecture, building on the basic infrastructure.
* Social tagging: Participative user-based approaches to knowledge 
organization and cataloguing are emerging and attracting significant 
community support. What is the role of social tagging and informal 
knowledge structures versus established KOS?

Semantic Web Special Session:

With the development of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), OWL 
Web Ontology Language and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), 
the W3C Semantic Web Activity promotes the deployment of technologies 
for expressing, exchanging and processing metadata in a form processable 
by machines.  The Dublin Core and related vocabularies of the Dublin 
Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) represents a crucial contribution to 
this growing suite of standards.

The goal of the special session is to support the deployment of Semantic 
Web methods in support of Knowledge Organization systems and services. 
The assumption underlying semantic digital libraries is that full-text 
search cannot be the entire solution for the massively expanding 
information space of emerging digital libraries.  Next-generation 
digital library systems must also be able to handle well-defined 
metadata describing the stored contents and provide machine support for 
the end users in their search for content. One crucial first step is to 
organize bibliographic metadata for automated interpretation by machines.

Major steps in this direction include:

    * Guidelines from the W3C Semantic Web Best Practice and
      Deployment Working Group.

    * The SKOS model for expressing mappings and existing concept
      structures such as thesauri, taxonomies and controlled
      vocabularies in a Semantic-Web-enabled form.

    * The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, which provides
      specifications on expressing Semantic-Web-conformant
      metadata in syntax languages such as XML and RDF/XML.

    * Prototypical Semantic Digital Library systems such as SIMILE,
      JeromeDL, and BRICKS.

    * Social Networking, a technology for collaborative
      filtering based on community-aware annotations.

    * WordNet, which organizes the vocabulary of the
      English language into synonym sets which are processable by
      machines for disambiguation.

Authors are encouraged to submit workshop contributions on these
and other related topics, such as:

    * Architecture and design of Semantic Digital Libraries
    * Case studies and application scenarios
    * Peer-to-peer solutions for interconnecting Semantic Digital
       Libraries
    * Enhanced semantic-aware search, browsing and retrieval
       functionalities
    * Integration of existing metadata into a Semantic Digital Library
    * Enabling ontologies, thesauri, and other controlled vocabularies
      for the Semantic Web

Program committee:

Hanne Albrechtsen, The Institute of Knowledge Sharing, Denmark
Thomas Baker, SUB - Goettingen State and University Library, Germany
Ron Davies, Information Consultant, Brussels, Belgium
Ian Davis, Talis, Birmingham, UK
Stefan Decker, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National 
University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Lois Delcambre, Computer Science Department, Portland State University, USA
Stella Dextre Clarke, Luke House, Wantage, UK
Martin Doerr, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and 
Technology (FORTH), Greece
Bernhard Haslhofer, ARC Seibersdorf Research, Studio Digital Memory 
Engineering, Austria
Carlo Meghini, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Pisa, 
Italy
Eva Mendez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Alistair Miles, CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
Libby Miller, W3C, Bristol, UK
Erich Neuhold, Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Axel Polleres, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland, USA
Diane Vizine-Goetz, OCLC Research, USA
Marcia Zeng, Kent State Univ, USA

-- 

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| TRAUGOTT KOCH, Research Officer. Research and Development,
| UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
| Tel: +44 1225 383218
| E-mail: T.Koch at ukoln.ac.uk
| Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.koch/
+-------------------------------------------------------------+