Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services
N K O S

NKOS is devoted to the discussion of the functional and data model for 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.

Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (KOS) model the underlying semantic structure of a domain. Embodied as Web-based services, they can facilitate resource discovery and retrieval. They act as semantic road maps and make possible a common orientation by indexers and future users (whether human or machine). -- Douglas Tudhope, Traugott Koch, New Applications of Knowledge Organization Systems

URL: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu
Last updated: Jan. 12, 2012

Announcement

New international thesaurus standard published

ISO 25964-­-1 is the new international standard for thesauri, replacing ISO 2788 and ISO 5964. The full title is Information and documentation -­- Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies -­- Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval. As well as covering monolingual and multilingual thesauri, it addresses 21st century needs for data sharing, networking and interoperability.

Content includes:

• construction of mono-­- and multi-­-lingual thesauri;
• clarification of the distinction between terms and concepts, and their inter-­-relationships;
• guidance on facet analysis and layout;
• guidance on the use of thesauri in computerized and networked systems;
• best practice for the management and maintenance of thesaurus development;
• guidelines for thesaurus management software;
• a data model for monolingual and multilingual thesauri;
• brief recommendations for exchange formats and protocols.

An XML schema for data exchange has been derived from the data model, and is available free of charge at http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/ . Coming next ISO 25964-­-1 is the first of two publications. Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies is in the public review stage and will be available by the end of 2012.

Find out how you can obtain a copy from the news release.

DCMI/NKOS Task Group

• The DCMI/NKOS Task Group targets to develop a Dublin Core Application Profile for KOS resources based on the work the NKOS group members have already done during the last decade. The application profile will be further tested by professionals and researchers.
  Task Group official webpage: http://dublincore.org/groups/nkos/
  Working wiki: http://www.metadataetc.org/wiki/dcmi-nkos/doku.php

Projects of KOS Registries, Terminology Services, and Standard Development

• HILT (High Level Thesaurus) project http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/index.html
  
  
• OCLC Terminologies Service
  Research: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/termservices/
  Service: http://www.oclc.org/terminologies/default.htm
  
  
• NSDL [vocabulary] Registry http://metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/list.html
  
  
• STAR (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources) http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/star/
  SKOS terminology services http://hypermedia.research.glam.ac.uk/kos/terminology_services/
  
  
• TRSS (Terminology Registry Scoping Study)   http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/trss/
  
  
• ISO 25964. Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies

  Work has been under way since May 2008 to revise and extend the International standards for thesauri, ISO 2788 and ISO 5964. The content of these two standards, plus a lot more material needed to support interoperability, will be combined in a new standard ISO 25964, as follows:

  ISO 25964. Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies

  • Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval (Published December 2011)
    
  • Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies (To be published December 2012)

  The work is managed by a Working Group known as ISO TC46/SC9/WG8, which has participants from 13 countries and is led by Stella Dextre Clarke of the UK. The Secretariat is provided by NISO (USA). See official website at http://www.niso.org/workrooms/iso25964.

  The most recent published news is in the ASIS&T Bulletin, at http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-08/OctNov08_DextreClark.pdf and a news release of January 9, 2012.

NKOS Listserv

• The NKOS list has been moved to OCLC.
  To send messages FOR DELIVERY TO THE WHOLE LIST, use http://listserv.oclc.org/archives/nkos-l.html or send to: nkos-l@oclc.org

  To send your first message, you will need to get a new password:

  1. Go to http://listserv.oclc.org/archives/nkos-l.html .
  2. Request a new password.
  3. From a confirmation email, click the confirmation link to confirm.
  4. Go back to http://listserv.oclc.org/archives/nkos-l.html, choose "Post to the list".
  5. Use the form to compose and send your message. You may attach files.

• Archive of NKOS discussion list messages from 6/2001 to 5/2007 has been hosted at DLI2 server
• All NKOS discussion list messages' archive is now hosted at OCLC. The owner is Diane Vizine-Goetz  vizine@oclc.org 
  

Related Publications

• JISC Terminology Registry Scoping Study (TRSS) report.  The report is published on JISC's TRSS project webpage. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/sharedservices/trss-report-final.pdf
  
  
• STERNA Technology Watch Report (2009-01): http://www.sterna-net.eu/index.php/en/downloads

• "What is Knowledge Organization", a special issue of Knowledge Organization, Vol. 35 (2008) No.2-3. See Preface and Table-of-Contents (Kind permission of Ergon-Verlag)
  
  
• JISC state-of-the-art review "Terminology Services and Technologies" (2006): http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/terminology/JISC-review2006.html
  
  
• Special Issue: Knowledge Organization Systems and Services (Volume 12 Issue 1 2006) -- Available through New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM) homepage at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=g749307486~db=all
  
  
• ARIST chapter: "Semantics and Knowledge Organization" by Birger Hjørland, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Volume 41 (2007)
  
  
• Knowledge Organization (ISSN 0943-7444), the official quarterly journal of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization).
  Table of contents: http://www.ergon-verlag.de/en/start.htm?information-_library_sciences_knowledge_organization_(journal).htm
  
  
• ANSI/NISO Z39.19 - 2005 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. ISBN: 1-880124-65-3. Search and download the standard at:
  http://www.niso.org/kst/reports/standards/
  
  
• Special issue of Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) on New Applications of Knowledge Organization Systems (Volume 4, issue 4, March 2004), Editors: Douglas Tudhope and Traugott Koch. http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/issue/view/20
  
  
• Special issue of Journal of Digital Information (JoDI) on the theme of Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (Volume 1, issue 8, April 2001), Editor: Traugott Koch. http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/issue/view/8
  
  

Past Workshops and Special Meetings

US NKOS Workshops (see also ECDL NKOS Workshops at next section)

• The 9th NKOS Workshop, "Knowledge Organization Systems: Managing Toward the Future", a Joint CENDI/NKOS Workshop, October 22, 2009, The National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD.
  
• The 8th NKOS Workshop "New Dimensions in Knowledge Organization Systems", a Joint NKOS/CENDI Workshop, September 11, 2008, The World Bank, Washington, DC.
  
• The 7th NKOS workshop "Next Generation Knowledge Organization Systems: Integration Challenges and Strategies" at JCDL 2005 June 10 and 11, Denver.
  
• The 6th NKOS Workshop "Building a Meaningful Web: From Traditional Knowledge Organization Systems to New Semantic Tools" at 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), May 31, 2003, Houston, TX. Workshop summary by Dagobert Soergel (ppt) was presented at the ECDL02 NKOS Workshop.
  
• The 5th NKOS Workshop "Digital gazetteers Integration into distributed digital library services" at the 2002 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, July 18th, Portland, Oregon. Workshop Summary (WORD file)
  
• The 4th NKOS Workshop "Classification Crosswalks: Bringing Communities Together" at the First ACM+IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) on June 28th, 2001 in Roanoke, VA.
  
• The 3rd NKOS Workshop at the 2000 ACM Digital Libraries Conference in San Antonio, Wednesday June 7th.
  
• The 2nd NKOS Workshop at the 1999 ACM Digital Libraries Conference in Berkeley, Saturday August 14th
  
• NKOS Workshops at the 1998 and 1997 ACM Digital Libraries Conferences: description of the workshop and notes from the workshop.

European NKOS Workshops (see also US NKOS Workshops above )

• 10th European NKOS Workshop at TPDL 2011, Berlin, Wednesday 28th afternoon and Thursday 29th morning, September, 2011September, 2011
• The 9th European NKOS Workshop at Ecdl2010 in Glasgow, Thursday 9th (start 2:30pm) – Friday 10th (finish 1.15pm) September 2010
  
• The 8th European NKOS Workshop at the 13th ECDL Conference, Corfu, Greece, Thursday, October 1st 2009
  
• The 7th European NKOS Workshop at ECDL 2008 Aarhus, Denmark. September 19 or 20, 2008.
  
• The 6th European NKOS Workshop Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services at ECDL 2007 September 21, Budapest, Hungary.
  
• The 5th European NKOS Workshop Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Services at ECDL2006 September 21, Alicante, Spain.
  
• The 4th European NKOS Workshop "Mapping Knowledge Organisation Systems: User-centred Strategies" at ECDL2005, September 22, Vienna. A report is published on D-Lib Magazine November 2005.

• The 3rd NKOS Workshop at ECDL, September 16, 2004, Bath, UK "User-centred approaches to Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS)".
  
• The 2nd NKOS Workshop "Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS): Evolving Standards" at ECDL 2003, August 21, 2003, Trondheim.
  
• NKOS Workshop "NKOS: European initiatives and projects / options for global co-operation" at the Fourth European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2000), 18-20 September 2000, Lisbon, Portugal.

International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) conferences

• Link to a list of all past, current, and future KO-related events
  

• Classification & Ontology, International UDC Seminar 2011, Sept. 19-20, 2011. The National Library of the Netherlands, the Hague.

• A special session “What role can KOS play in information retrieval applications?” at the second biennial conference of the UK Chapter of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization), ISKO-UK 2011 Conference, July 2011.
• Abstracts, papers, and PPTs are available from the conference program page: http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/programme.htm
• Program highlights: http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/programmehighlights.htm
  
  
• Tenth International ISKO Conference, Montréal, Canada, August 5-8, 2008. Conference website: http://www.ebsi.umontreal.ca/isko2008/
  Conference Theme: Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organization

• OCLC/ISKO-NA Preconference Workshop: “Everything Need Not Be Miscellaneous: Controlled Vocabularies and Classification in a Web World” (presentations)
  
  
• 9th ISKO International Conference, Vienna, Austria, July 4th-7th, 2006. The theme of the conference is: “Knowledge Organization for a Global Learning Society”. http://isko.univie.ac.at/cms2/index.php

NKOS Workshops at DCxx International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications

• NKOS Workshop at DC 2008, Berlin, Wed., September 24, 2008
  The preliminary agenda is on the preparation wiki page:
  http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/NKOSevents_2008_preparation

• NKOS Special Session at DC-2005 "Enhancing the Understanding of Meaning: Practical Applications of Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS)" (September 13, 2005). See details and presentation files
  
  
• DC2003, Seattle from Sept. 28 - Oct. 2, special session on Metadata Value Spaces. Traugott Koch presented Activities to advance the powerful use of vocabularies in the digital environment - Structured overview.

Other NKOS meetings and sessions

• ASIST Annual Meeting

"Linked Data --Enabling Standards and Other Approaches" -- Panel presentations at ASIS- 2010

1. Gail Hodge: Introduction.
2. Sam Oh: Linked Data and Identifiers. (ISO TC46/SC9 (Identification and Description activities updates; the second edition of Web Ontology Language (OWL2))
3. Jon Phipps: SKOS: A W3C Recommendation.
4. Ed Summers: RDFa -- Linked Data on the Web We Have. (external link)
5. Mark Needleman and Jody DeRidder: NISO I2 (Institutional Identifiers)
6. Marcia Zeng, Jon Phipps, and Ed Summers: Introducing W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group (LLD XG)

"Knowledge Organization:  Evaluating Foundation and Function in the Information Ecosystem" -- Panel presentations at ASIS- 2010

1. Marjorie Hlava: Introduction to the panel.
2. Hollie White: Framing NKOS Evaluation: HIVE’s Approach.
3. Denise A. D. Bedford: International Development Thesaurus – Moving Collaboration and Assessment Upstream
4. Gail Hodge, Information International Associates (IIa): Evaluating NKOS in the EPA Enterprise: Supporting Real Ecosystems

Web Service-based Applications: Optimizing Indexing, Searching, and Terminology Services, ASIST 2008 (Link to program description).
. . Rebecca Guenther. A Registry for controlled vocabularies at the Library of Congress (ppt)
. . Diane Vizine-Goetz. OCLC Terminology Services beta: Architecture & Standards (link)
. . Dongming Zhang. Developing a Webservice-based MeSH indexing Tool for Health Science Repository System (ppt)

• "The Challenge of the Electronic Environment to the Organization of Knowledge": Second International Seminar on Subject Access to Information, Helsinki, Finland, 29-30 November 2007 | Program (pdf) with links to abstracts. http://www.terkko.helsinki.fi/STKS.KV.Ontologia%20Programme.261107.pdf
  

• NKOS Special Meeting at the NetLab conference, April 12, 2002, Lund University, Sweden
  Discussion of standard developments regarding the use of thesauri, classification and other KO systems on the net .
  
  
• Digital Gazetteer Information Exchange (DGIE) workshop, funded by the NSF, October 1999. http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/gazetteer//dgie/DGIE_website/DGIE_homepage.htm
  

NKOS Registry

• NKOS Draft Registry, Thesaurus Description Attributes
• Version 3 NKOS Draft Registry, with Reference Document for Data Elements - Draft, 14 June 2001

Taxonomy of Knowledge Organization Systems

• Taxonomy of Knowledge Organization Systems (draft)

Vocabulary Mark-up Language (Voc-ML)

Vocabulary ML: Metacode strawman DTD draft (developed in 2000, superseded by other activities such as SKOS and some of the ISO standards work on terminologies)

 
Questions and suggestions should be sent to mzeng at kent dot edu