Call for Papers

Special issue on

New Applications of Knowledge Organization Systems

Special issue Editors: Traugott Koch and Doug Tudhope*
Lund University (Programme Chair ECDL 2003)
Email: traugott.koch@lub.lu.se
*University of Glamorgan (Chair, NKOS Workshop at ECDL 2003)
Email: dstudhope@glam.ac.uk

Schedule

Submission deadline: Extended to 21 October 2003
Publication date: January 2004

Theme

Submissions are sought for a special edition of the Journal of Digital Information (Information Discovery theme) on new applications and contexts for Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS). This includes but is not restricted to novel applications and representations of KOS in advanced digital library (DL) and semantic Web environments.

This call builds on two recent NKOS workshops:

at JCDL 2003 in Houston, Texas: "Building a meaningful Web: From traditional Knowledge Organization Systems to new semantic tools"
at ECDL 2003 in Trondheim, Norway: "Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS): Evolving Standards"

A number of submissions have already been committed based on presentations given at these meetings.

More generally, we welcome submissions that fit the scope of the call from all interested parties and communities. Articles from a previous NKOS issue (April 2001) rank among the most popular JoDI publications based on access statistics.

KOS services, such as classifications, gazetteers, lexical databases, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri model the underlying semantic structure of a domain. Embodied as (Web) services, they can facilitate resource discovery and retrieval. They act as semantic road maps and make possible a common orientation by indexers and future users (whether human or machine). However, using them to their full potential in advanced DL and semantic Web applications poses various new challenges. For example, we have the opportunity to formalise and enrich existing KOS representations, exploiting the infrastructure of semantic Web languages and technologies. New networked KOS services and applications are emerging and we are reaching the stage where we can exploit common representations and protocols for distributed use. We are also seeing initiatives for the integration of work by the terminology studies/language engineering community. Empirical studies of use, evaluation of interface design and KOS visualisations are needed for effective design of KOS intended for digital environments and of KOS-based services.

Indicative Topics

(not intended to be exhaustive)

Digital library requirements for integration of KOS into DL services
Standards for constructing, representing and applying KOS in digital environments
Namespaces and registries for KOS and KOS relationships
Methodologies, tools and formats for the construction and maintenance of vocabularies and for mapping between terms, classes and systems
Frameworks for the analysis of assumptions and viewpoints underlying the construction and application of terminology systems
Maintenance and update of KOS
Interoperability, cross-browsing and cross-searching between distributed services based on KOS
Distributed access to KOS: standard solutions and protocols for query and response, taxonomy servers, Web service applications
Methods for the combination and adaptation of different vocabularies
Knowledge organisation as support for Web-based information retrieval, query expansion, cross-language searching
Knowledge organisation for filtering, information extraction, summary
Knowledge organisation for indexing and annotation
Knowledge organisation support for multilingual systems, natural language processing or machine translation
Application of language engineering/terminology/corpus analysis with KOS
Semantic Web applications of KOS
Ontology description languages, standards and applications
XML/RDF representations for KOS content
User interfaces, user terminology services and KOS visualisation, knowledge bases for supportive and adaptive KOS user interfaces
Evaluation and studies of use, end-user interactions with KOS

Submission

Authors should submit their papers electronically using the submission form. Selecting the title or editor for this issue from the Theme or Editor drop-down box will alert the editor to your submission automatically.

Before submitting please take note of the journal's Guidelines for submission: notes for authors. There is no fixed length for submissions. Authors who wish to submit a paper with unusual features are requested to contact the Special issue Editors prior to submission. All submissions will be subject to peer review.

The submission deadline is October 7, 2003.

The Journal of Digital Information is an electronic journal published only via the Web. JoDI is currently free to all users thanks to support from the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press.