Evolution and variation of classification systems – how stable is the organization of knowledge and how diverse is its representations? Toward a Metadata Observatory
Announcement of a workshop, March 4-5, 2015, DANS & eHumanities group, Amsterdam
For digital libraries and archives mapping schemas, ontologies, all different kind of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) belongs to the daily practice when ingesting information from different sources. In computer science, the technical term for this task is ontology alignment. In particular with the emergence of the semantic web, the need to integrate heterogeneous data into one web of knowledge has grown. Further, these ontologies under revision and change over time. So the complexity of ontology alignment is exacerbated by the challenge of version identification and control. Ontologies have a long history, and are as a topic of reflection situated among philosophy and computer science. However, there is no atlas of ontologies, KOS or metadata schemes nor a registry or index to search across different existing ones, including all versions. The current landscape is a set of isolated registries with disjunct purposes and scopes. We miss a common language to describe basic attributes of KOS, as their knowledge domain specificity, depth, age, or complexity. This workshop explores way to define an attribute space in which KOS can be compared among each other and across time. Inspired by the study of planets and stars in the heavens, the long-term goal is to build a metadata observatory.
As part of the workshop Professor Joe Tennis (University of Washington, Seattle) will give a lecture at the eHumanities research meeting series Upcoming new trends in eHumanities, February 5, 2015, 15.00-17.00
