This post is 4th in a series about the UDC consortium international seminar in The Hague, 19-20 September, 2011.

Interoperability of knowledge organization systems with and through ontologies

Daniel Kless from the University of Melbourne pointed out that problems with ontologies arise when combining them, as errors in combination can have disastrous effects on subsequent reasoning. A well-defined modelling method is needed to minimise this. Standards such as OWL and RDF do not address the problems of methodology or terminology control.

Towards the integration of knowledge organization systems with the linked data cloud

Vincenzo Maltese of the University of Trento, Italy, explained how it is vital to make clear the semantics and purpose of any ontology when attempting to share Linked Data. Ontologies may differ in their scope, purpose, structure, terminology, language, coverage, formality, and conceptualization. He drew a distinction between descriptive ontologies and classification ontologies. It is very easy to convert a descriptive ontology to a classification ontology and the process can be automated, but extremely difficult to convert a classification ontology to a descriptive one and the process requires human intellectual and editorial effort.

Classification and reference vocabulary in linked environment data

Joachim Fock of the Federal Environment Agency (Germany) talked about how they transformed their keyword thesaurus to a Linked Data format.