By Patrick Lambe

At the beginning of July I presented a paper at the ISKO UK Conference on the need for knowledge organisation professionals to build design competencies: "From Cataloguers to Designers: Paul Otlet, social impact and a more proactive role for knowledge organisation professionals". A slight accident prevented me from travelling to London, and so I prepared a video presentation. 

Here is the accompanying paper: 
In the early 20th century, Paul Otlet carved out a role for bibliography and documentation as a force for positive social change. While his ideals appeared to be utopian to many of his contemporaries, his activism and vision foreshadowed the potential (for good and evil) of the World Wide Web. This paper discusses the role that knowledge organisation professionals could play in enhancing the positive social impact of the web of knowledge, and how our roles are shifting from the more passive role of descriptive cataloguers, to proactive designers of positive and productive knowledge environments.

  Download the paper here and visit the Vimeo page here

Dave Clarke also presented at ISKO UK on the deep image indexing tool OASIS - his materials are available here, including a 20 page paper discussing Deep Image Annotation that expands upon the topics presented by Dave Clarke to IKO Singapore in June.

By Matt Moore

What do knowledge organisation professionals do? One thing was obvious from the 2015 IKO conference - KO professionals are engaged in a wide variety of activities. I could list all 15 case studies, as each had something valuable to impart but just a few give a flavour of this diversity:

* The BBC and the National Library Board of Singapore are building frameworks with Linked Data to not only open up their content to the general public but connect their content to other sources to provide a richer and more holistic user experience.

* Search Explained and Flax are applying search technologies both inside and outside the enterprise to make content more accessible for their clients.

* PebbleRoad were out observing how users actually do their jobs rather than just assuming the problems they faced were obvious, and designing apps that connected them to the data needed to support their tasks

* Straits Knowledge was working with graph databases to develop knowledge maps capable of being analysed for taxonomy-building

* Synaptica was building a Linked Data-ready image annotation system so that rich knowledge bases could be built around detailed images.

One way of understanding this complexity is to map out the skills that practitioners require to successfully implement projects like these. Any such mapping attempt will be always be provisional and subject to change. Such a mapping will have to find a balance between between having too little detail to be useful and too much detail to be manageable. And such a mapping faces the risks of any taxonomy that is being applied to taxonomists, such as differences in terminology and organising frameworks.  Read the rest of this article here.

Use our online  KO Competencies Framework  to identify your self development needs here. If you want to receive a report on the aggregated results of participants, include your email in the survey - we will only use this email address to communicate the results.

By Ahren Lehnert

The phrase "text analytics" might conjure up images of a group of computational linguists poring over complicated algorithms to reveal truth in language through some mixture of language study, advanced computer science, and alchemy. There is some accuracy to this. Because of this perceived complexity, non-academics may shy away from investigating the use and practical application of text analytics unless they are in very technical areas, e.g., business intelligence.   Read the rest of this article here.

By Margie Hlava & Ben Kasenchak

As interest in  Linked Data  (LD) continues to grow, many organizations-publishers, corporations, universities, libraries-are increasingly interested in strategies to jump-start LD initiatives. Any organisation that has an existing taxonomy (or other controlled vocabulary) can expedite the move to LD by leveraging its existing semantic structures as a bridge to an advanced LD-based semantic strategy.   Read the rest of this article here.

Singapore

World Information Architecture Day is a one-day annual conference hosted by the Information Architecture Institute and held in dozens of cities across the world. It is a day where IA folk meet and share their knowledge and celebrate IA in a global way. World IA day 2016 will  be held on February 20, 2016, and for the first time, Singapore is one of the official host cities. Maish Nichani from PebbleRoad will be coordinating the activities for this event. You can follow him on Twitter (@maish) to get updates on preparations for the event. 

More on World IA day at  http://2015.worldiaday.org/what-is-world-ia-day/

London 13-14 July 2015

 

Records management systems are often left out of the knowledge organisation loop. To address this issue, our friends at PoolParty have a new article and supporting video on "semantic records management based on controlled vocabularies". 

Here's a supporting article on usability in records management from StepTwo designs in Australia.