[Sigcr-l] Panel proposal of KOS Standards for ASIST AM 07

[mzeng at kent.edu]

Panel: Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) Standards
Sponsors:  Standards Committee and SIG-CR

Summary: 

Knowledge organization systems (KOS), such as classification schemes, 
gazetteers, lexical databases, taxonomies thesauri, and ontologies, 
contribute to the foundation of a whole new generation of websites, 
intranets, portals, document management systems, and other web-based 
services.  While the digital environment offers more possibilities of 
presenting information from different interests and discourses, the 
challenge is as much intellectual as technical when we want to develop 
KOS that are useful and meaningful for the end-users operating in 
complex, interdisciplinary knowledge domains.  
	
This panel will provide an update of national and international 
standards that relate to the development and encoding of KOS in the 
digital environment.  The newly published U.S. standard Z39.19 covers 
a wide range of KOS types, including pick lists, synonym rings, 
taxonomies, and thesauri.  The on-going five-parts British standard 
touches thesauri and other structured vocabularies for information 
retrieval, such as classification schemes, business classification 
schemes for records management, taxonomies, subject heading schemes, 
and ontologies.  Beyond these content standards, encoding standards 
developed at W3C will also be introduced in this session, including 
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), a set of specifications 
supporting the use of KOS within the framework of the Semantic Web, 
and OWL Web Ontology Language.  The panel will also initiate a 
discussion regarding the implementation of these standards in 
government, not-for-profit, and industry projects, esp
ecially the use of these standards and their integration with other 
standards, such as ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registries (MDR) standard. 

Moderator:  Marcia Zeng
Standards Committee chair.  Professor, School of Library and 
Information Science, Kent State University,  mzeng at kent.edu, 330-672-
0009

Panelists:
Margie Hlava, President, Access Innovations, Inc. mhlava at accessinn.com
Jian Qin, Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse 
University.  jqin at syr.edu
Gail Hodge, Senior Information Scientist, Information International 
Associates, Inc (IIa). ghodge at iiaweb.com