I will probably be on the other side of the Atlantic when the ISKO UK conference takes place in July in London, UK. I will be sorry to miss it, because the committee have brought together a diverse, topical, and fascinating collection of speakers.

ISKO UK excels in unifying academic and practitioner communities, and the conference promises to investigate the barriers that separate research from practice and to seek out boundary objects that can bring the communities together.

This is demonstrated in person by the keynote speakers Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge and Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd – both respected for their commercial as well as academic contributions to the field of Knowledge Organization.

Amidst what is already shaping up to be a very full and varied programme, the presentations by Jeremy Tarling and Matt Shearer (BBC News) and Jarred McGinnis and Helen Lippell (Press Association) will show how research in semantic techniques is now being put to practical use in managing the fast-flowing oceans of information that news organizations handle.

The programme also includes a whole session on combining ontologies with other tools, as well as papers on facet analysis and construction of controlled vocabularies. There’s even some epistemology to please pure theoreticians.