News

The ISKO UK Executive Committee has taken the very difficult decision to cancel the ISKO UK 2021 biennial conference due to the insufficient number of submissions.

The overall response was too low for us to have a viable event. We are sorry for the disappointment that this will cause. The biennial conference is normally a highlight of our events calendar. We are grateful for the support that we have had from colleagues and potential authors and we would encourage authors to consider submitting research papers to the ISKO journal Knowledge Organization.

Over the last year ISKO UK has organised a well-attended series of online Knowledge Organization Meetups and the KO-ED series of workshops in response to the Covid-19 lockdown. These will continue to run in 2021 along with the Knowledge Organization Research Observatory workshops starting on 31st March.

ISKO UK starts a new series of regular monthly events devoted to knowledge organization research.  The series entitled "Knowledge Organization Research Observatory" will take place online, and will include talks on research projects in the knowledge organization and related fields, in the UK and internationally. The first event in the series is scheduled for 31 March "AI in supporting fact checking, news verification and creative work".

In this Meetup, Dr Tony Russell-Rose considered knowledge workers such as information professionals, legal researchers and librarians and their requirements to create and execute search strategies that are comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible.

Slides are available here

With sadness we report the death on 26 November 2020 of Jean Aitchison, one of the founding members of ISKO UK, who inspired at least two generations with her work on techniques of knowledge organization, particularly faceted classification and thesaurus construction. For more on her life and achievements, see the obituary .

Email and MS Teams from an information architecture perspective

In this Meetup, James Lappin explored what strategies towards email will best enable information professionals to make a positive contribution to how messages are managed, protected and exploited as a knowledge resource.

Slides available here

Interactive workshop: getting started with VocBench (step 1)

The slide deck, handouts and video file are available for viewing here.

At this Meetup, Jennifer Parrucci, Senior Taxonomist at The New York Times, gave a peak into the newspaper's legacy of metadata use, how tags are assigned today and how this metadata powers products and internal services.

You can view slides here

ISKO UK Meetup* events are now organized through the Knowledge Organization group.

Sign up and join our group at Meetup to know more and register for our monthly Zoom events.

In this September virtual ISKO UK Meetup, four speakers gave a demonstration of tools that help them building taxonomies, including: 

1. PoolParty CardSorting software with Ian Piper - Slides
2. Thesaurus manager Similarity and Suggestions with Niké Brown 
3. Graphcommons with Phil Stacey   Slides
4. Qualitative data analysis computer software Nvivo 12 with David Haynes Slides

Knowledge Graphs, Part II: Practical Applications

Once again, we were privileged to have Bob Kasenchak and Ahren Lehnert from Synaptica share their knowledge of Knowledge Graphs, this time, by going through a wealth of applications.

Thanks to Bob and Ahren for a very engaging presentation. Their slides can be viewed here