Tag Archives: conferences

ISKO international 2008

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I have just returned from the 10th International ISKO conference in Montreal, which was four days of excellent KO presentations. The pre-conference workshop was on SKOS and the conference itself included around 50 papers and a poster session. Some of my favourites were Knowledge and Trust in Epistemology and Social Software by Judith Simon, a Survey of the Top-level Categories in the Structure of Corporate Websites by Abdus Sattar Chaudhry, Deliberate Bias in Knowledge Organisation by Birger Hjorland, and Social Tagging and Communities of Practice by Edward Corrado and Heather Moulaison.

I’ll be writing up my conference notes and posting them here over the weekend.

ISKO conference

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I am very much looking forward to the Tenth International ISKO Conference, which will be held in Montréal, Canada, on August 5-8, 2008. The theme of the conference is Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organisation and the keynote address will be delivered by Jonathan Furner, Associate Professor at UCLA: “Interrogating ‘identity’: A Philosophical Approach to an Enduring Issue in Knowledge Organization”. There is also a workshop session and the famous banquet (I’m glad I’m not doing the seating plan – how do you please everyone when you have to organise experts in organisation?)

I’ve already highlighted The Role of Causality and Conceptual Coherence in Assessments of Similarity by Louise Spiteri; Knowledge Organization in the Cross-cultural and Multicultural Society by Ágnes Hajdu Barát; and Deliberate Bias in Knowledge Organization? by Birger Hjørland, but there are about 60 papers being presented in all.

Metadata and Taxonomy Conference

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The Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy Conference in London on March 10th was a first for event organisers Henry Stewart Events. They were told that the subject was “too niche” , “no-one would turn up”, and “noboby would be interested”. They were not dissuaded, and went ahead with what turned out to be a wonderfully content-rich and fact-dense day. I’ve written a summary of the conference which is available here.

A host of big name speakers (Madi Solomon former Corporate Nomenclature Taxonomist of Walt Disney, Seth Earley of Earley & Associates, John Jordan of Siemens, Chris Sizemore and Silver Oliver from the BBC were just a few) gave fascinating and insightful talks. There were also lots of software overviews which I found very helpful (including an assessment by Theresa Regli from CMS Watch) and as is always a real treat at these events the opportunity to meet lots of other taxonomists and information architects. The food was good too!

ISKO UK

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I went to the ISKO UK conference Ranganathan Revisited on Monday sponsored by Factiva, which was very interesting indeed. There were 5 presentations – two on classification theory, a fascinating insight into how Factiva sort and output the thousands of news reports they process every day, an introduction to a very interesting new meta-analysis energy portal for monitoring trends in reporting, and a demonstration of Aduna’s Autofocus software that gives a visual representation of searches. One of the interesting and perennial themes that came up in conversations was the difference in approach of computer scientists from people with an information and library skills background. Some people seem to think of this as a battleground, but I like to think the best ideas emerge at the confluence of different paths.