Plenary: Issues in Knowledge Organization Research: An Interactive Panel Discussion. Joe Tennis, moderator.
Tennis’ intro:
Do we all come with the same purpose?
Dow we all come with the same conceptualization of the problem space?
- James Turner, Professor, University of Montreal.
- Clare Beghtol, Professor, University of Toronto.
- Jens-Erik Mai, Professor and Vice Dean, University of Toronto.
James Turner
Initial comments were on papers presented on the 1st day.
Pimentel: Conversations. Right way to do it?
Zhang: Breaking down to component parts of resource/granularity.
Campbell: “World seems hostile to rigor and good practice.” “The Web is not one thing/community, especially Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.” [paraphrases of Campbell]
Feinberg: “Browsing different than searching, but same goal.” Personal KO schemes; get at them via ethnomethodological methods (interviews, …).
Kasten: reactive -> centralized; proactive -> decentralized, hmmm?
Lots of nostalgia re vertical files; might mean something
- browsing
- personal KO
Clare Beghtol
Purpose(s) of KO
“Classification is a cognitive imperative.”
- “Language is classification.”
- “What behavior is not classification?”
“We have not kept control of structure; now we worry that the structure conveys little meaning.”
Assumption ethics. [I think this is what she said; didn't get the references (down)].
Jens-Erik Mai
“What is KO (in this day)?”
Computer science doesn’t know what we know; from comment by James Turner in his intro, BUT
“do we know what we know?”
Universe of knowledge: The organization of this has been our goal for past 130 years. Now we know there are lots of ways to do it and that there is no one way.
Realization that users are important.
“KO used to be about system (“the one system”), what should we teach now?”
“What is common to us and our new organization?”
Clearly, James Turner set the stage by recapping the symposium so far. Clare Beghtol added valuable commentary and provided some theoretical reminders/possibilities. Jens-Erik asked a lot of questions and added a bit of commentary to get the audience primed to contribute to the conversation which was a good half of the plenary. Very nice method.
Discussion portion of Plenary
[Comments will be attributed where I can; did not know who some people were and most did not introduce themselves before speaking. "**" - will mean the commentor is unknown. Also, unsure anymore what is paraphrase and what is a direct quote, and even then there is much context missing so be wary in drawing any inferences from these very disembodied and decontextualized snippets of conversation.]:
Barbara Kwasnik – principled guidelines for construction/designing an organization ….
Richard Smiraglia – gave examples of ed of KO as to “do we know what we know?” [Wish I had gotten an example or 2 down!]
** – vertical files.
Rebecca Green – how often are different classifications compatible? Is our biggest issue mapping from one persons classification to another?
Joe Tennis – there are lots of bad ways, wonder if there are any good ways? Maybe so at the local levels, not so much more globally.
** – attempt to close knowledge off to people — rights, censorship, IP, … — do these issues belong to the field and the new organization?
** – examples of, “Yes, these are (or should be) important issues to us.” [Again, wish I had recorded these.]
D. Grant Campbell – we have plenty of diverse user studies. We need to synthesize these for useful patterns/meta-analysis.
DGC – granularity is a Pandora’s Box; maybe we need to open it though. Maybe the semantic relationships folks (Beghtol, Green, …) can help. [Dr. Green's presentation, which hadn't happened yet, is a step toward granularity and coherence in the content vs. carrier issue(s).]
Barbara Kwasnik – natural language processing as a 1st disambiguation.
Jens-Erik Mai – user studies – we don’t know what we need to know about users, despite these studies. [Amen to this! We know some but, honestly, besides not knowing what we know (Grant's assertion) we also do not know what we do need to know about users.]
JEM – what happens when universities/scholarship take back peer reviewing and “we” publish digitally (without publishers)? What does this mean for classification? [Very important questions to consider as we redefine (or define for the 1st time) what it is that we need to know.]
** – from an IR perspective
evaluation needs to shift from system/KO scheme to “does it get the job done?”
is it about subject contents (knowledge) or objects?
DGC – over-reliance on hierarchy; need other visualizations.
I really think that this could have gone on for a lot longer and I wish it had been possible to do so. But I imagine most everyone else feels this way, too. These kinds of discussions are so important and, yet, so rare.
Closing Session: Knowledge Organization in North America, Kathryn La Barre
Kathryn provided a synopsis of the symposium. Photos of Kathryn’s slides begin here.
This is another presentation from which I have few notes as I was trying to be more present than I might be normally, which is why I have all of her slides. A quick snap and focus on the spoken content.
The slide, “Charge” provides a good recap of many of the key questions/research agenda to have arisen during the day and a half of this (hopefully historic) Symposium.
The ideas on that slide define a large portion of my life right now and for the foreseeable future. One of the previous slides, “terms/concepts/topics,” does also but in a more atomic sense. Even the title of the slide carries so much meaning to me. Are these terms and ideas that you conflate? We can’t even begin to talk about each of those words as terms, concepts, or topics without, at least, jumping into a deep ditch. It may not be a bottomless chasm but it gets very deep, very quickly.
Once again, thanks to all involved, in particular those who had the vision and brought it to fruition. Here’s to more wonderful ideas hatched amongst colleagues over drinks!
I hope to be involved with the (almost) newly formed ISKO-NA. I also hope to be able to attend ISKO in Montreal next year.
Have I mentioned how much I love these little intimate, relaxed conferences/conversations?
