Last Wednesday morning I headed out for Toronto, Canada with my advisor, Kathryn La Barre, for the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, June 14-15, 2007.
The conference was Thursday afternoon and all day Friday with approximately 40 people in attendance. Big names, little names, old names, young names, academics (mostly), corporate folks, those in various middles.
At the end of the 1st day we had a business meeting at which the North American chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO-NA) was born. I do not mean to be pretentious, but this was an historic moment. I am a bit too fresh to this field to know all of the history but this moment has been a long time in coming and is long overdue.
ISKO’s Mission
Founded in 1989, ISKO is the leading international society for organization of knowledge. ISKO has a broad and interdisciplinary scope. ISKO’s mission is to advance conceptual work in knowledge organization in all kinds of forms, and for all kinds of purposes, such as databases, libraries, dictionaries and the Internet.
As an interdisciplinary society, ISKO brings together professionals from many different fields. ISKO counts more than 500 members all over the world, from fields such as information science, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, as well as special domains such as medical informatics.
In order to achieve its mission and goals, ISKO works to
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- promote research, development and applications of knowledge organization systems that advance the philosophical, psychological and semantic approaches for ordering knowledge
- provide the means of communication and networking on knowledge organization for its members
- function as a connecting link between all institutions and national societies, working with problems related to the conceptual organization and processing of knowledge
We were welcomed by Brian Cantwell Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. He told us that despite a hiring freeze across the university FIS was being allowed to double both the number of faculty and students.
Richard Smiraglia, Long Island University, and Chair of NASKO 2007 was the next to welcome us.
[Conference papers available at dLIST.]
Next up was Clare Beghtol as the moderator for Contributed Papers Session 1. Papers presented in this session were:
Exploring Classification as Conversation. David M. Pimentel, Syracuse University. [my pre-conference comments here.]
I think that David is on to something here. I had a nice (but short) chat with him on Day 2. He seems to have narrowed his ideas a bit from what is in the paper, which is fair. I’d like to see this progress and then would be real interested in how we conceptualize and then build systems that can implement such ideas.
Ontology and the Semantic Web. Jane Zhang, Harvard University.
Coffee break
Jens-Erik Mai as moderator of Contributed Papers Session 2:
Everything Old is New Again: Finding a Home for Knowledge Structures in a Satisficing World. D. Grant Campbell, et. al., University of Western Ontario.
This paper is about “moving” vertical files to the Semantic Web. They are working within the area of Alzheimer’s Disease and providing a question and answer system that is designed for patients, family members, care givers and doctors. On the way home I realized that this is not really very Semantic Web-like at all. I guess one could say it is minimal-level SW. I guess I’d concede that, but only with a “barely.” This is not to suggest that it is not a useful project. I do believe that it shows promise. It just isn’t all that semantic.
Beyond Retrieval: A Proposal to Expand the Design Space of Classification. Melanie Feinberg, University of Washington.
Knowledge Strategy and its Influence on Knowledge Organization. Joseph Kasten, Dowling College.
Business Meeting: Rebecca Green was elected to chair the meeting and Clare Beghtol was elected as recorder.
A short discussion ensued as to establishing a North American chapter of ISKO. This was unanimously supported.
Richard Smiraglia, Joe Tennis and Kathryn La Barre were elected to draft our by-laws, submit a formal application to ISKO and to begin the process for our next meeting in 2009.
I am seriously looking forward to being involved with this organization and I hope that it will be a long-lived one. Kathryn has my name (formally) and will help me get involved with the planning for the next conference.
Day 2 will be covered in another post. But before I forget:
I really enjoyed myself at NASKO 2007! Thank you to our hosts, the planners, the student volunteers, the presenters and all in attendance for such a wonderful time.
