Aida Slavic

Aida Slavic

The vision of the Semantic Web (SW) is gradually unfolding and taking shape through a web of linked data, a part of which is built by capturing semantics stored in existing knowledge organization systems (KOS), subject metadata and resource metadata. The content of vast bibliographic collections is currently categorized by some widely used bibliographic classification and we may soon see them being mined for information and linked in a meaningful way across the Web. Bibliographic classifications are designed for knowledge mediation which offers both a rich terminology and different ways in which concepts can be categorized and related to each other in the universe of knowledge. From 1990-2010 they have been used in various resource discovery services on the Web and continue to be used to support information integration in a number of international digital library projects. In this chapter we will revisit some of the ways in which universal classifications, as language independent concept schemes, can assist humans and computers in structuring and presenting information and formulating queries. Most importantly, we highlight issues important to understanding bibliographic classifications, both in terms of their unused potential and technical limitations.

Aida Slavic

The paper discusses issues related to the use of faceted classifications in an online environment. The author argues that knowledge organization systems can be fully utilized in information retrieval only if they are exposed and made available for machine processing. The experience with classification automation to date may be used to speed up and ease the conversion of existing faceted schemes or the creation of management tools for new systems. The author suggests that it is possible to agree on a set of functional requirements for supporting faceted classifications online that are equally relevant for the maintenance of classifications, the creation of classification indexing tools, or the management of classifications in an authority file. It is suggested that a set of requirements for analytico-synthetic classifications may be put forward to improve standards for the use and exchange of knowledge organization systems.

Peter Mutschke, Andrea Scharnhorst, Christophe Guéret et al.

Information systems usually show as a particular point of failure the vagueness between user search terms and the knowledge orders of the information space in question. Some kind of guided searching therefore becomes more and more important in order to precisely discover information without knowing the right search terms. Knowledge maps of digital library collections are promising navigation tools through knowledge spaces but still far away from being applicable for searching digital libraries. However, there is no continuous knowledge exchange between the "map makers" on the one hand and the Information Retrieval (IR) specialists on the other hand. Thus, there is also a lack of models that properly combine insights of the two strands. The proposed workshop aims at bringing together these two communities: experts in IR reflecting on visual enhanced search interfaces and experts in knowledge mapping reflecting on visualizations of the content of a collection that might also present a context for a search term in a visual manner. The intention of the workshop is to raise awareness of the potential of interactive knowledge maps for information seeking purposes and to create a common ground for experiments aiming at the incorporation of knowledge maps into IR models at the level of the user interface.