Posted on behalf of Heather Inskip, MSc Student
Whilst I may have initially been mainly excited about the prospect of Greek sunshine after a rather lacklustre British summer, my trip to Thessaloniki for the 17th European NKOS workshop proved to be exciting from an academic perspective as well.
It was held at Thessaloniki’s Grand Hotel Palace following the three-day Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) conference. It was one of a number of workshops offered there on that day, and was attended by about twenty delegates. Phillip Mayr from GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany, and Ernesto William de Luca from the Georg Eckert Institute, also in Germany, were two of the events organisers, and chaired the sessions.
The workshop content was relevant to my dissertation, which revolves around developing a thesaurus for information literacy and exploring the possibility of publishing it as linked open data, and through the various presentations, I was able to garner a better understanding of some of the aspects of linking controlled vocabularies. It was helpful to see real-world examples of both projects involving linked vocabularies, as well as tools developed for the purpose of linking knowledge organisation systems.
The day began with a presentation by Ernesto William de Luca on Knowledge Organisation for Digital Libraries, and he discussed user expectations in terms of knowledge organisation and information access in the face of an abundance of available information. He clearly stated disambiguation as the goal of faceted search, indicating that it combats the difficulties creating when terms have been assigned to articles or resources ambiguously.
Joachim Neubert from the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Germany made a presentation about Wikidata. He promoted the possibility of mapping Knowledge Organisation Systems to Wikidata, persuasively delineating the benefits of how extensible it is, and being able to easily update NKOS (networked knowledge organisation systems) centrally through Wikidata. He proposed the addition of SKOS mapping to Wikidata. It made me wonder whether it would possible and beneficial to try to upload the information literacy thesaurus I’m working on into Wikidata; possibly something I’ll attempt!
For me, one of the most interesting parts of the day was learning about VocBench. Initially it was introduced as part of a demo session, which featured a few different software programs designed for NKOS, and then Armando Stellato, from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, made a presentation about the development of the new VocBench 3.0—which is now the recommended tool for EU institutions for the management of controlled vocabularies. It was interesting to see the differences between it and TemaTres, the vocabulary management tool that I am currently using for the thesaurus that I’m developing.
Other presentations included one by Olga Lavrenova from The Russian State Library about publishing a classification KOS as a linked data vocabulary, which is very similar to what I am aiming to do, and one by Nicholas Collis from the University of Bedfordshire about the development of a crowd-sourced search tool designed to make querying linked data easier for the average user, so that linked data becomes valuable even to those who don’t know how to use SPARQL.
All around it was a positive experience, and one that I was able to take away helpful information from for working on my dissertation.
Links to the papers that were presented at the workshop can be found here: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1937/