Tutorial Description

This tutorial is intended for anyone concerned with the organization of materials in digital libraries for subject access, sense-making, and inference.  It provides a bridge by presenting methods of knowledge organization as treated in an information studies program for those coming to digital libraries from other fields.  It emphasizes both using and creating meaningful structure that can assist users in formulating queries and making sense of the results. It introduces KOS development methods and data structures and touches on the relevant Web standards.

Tutorial Structure

Part 1. Structure and use of KOS in knowledge-based assistance to users 

In discussing KOS functions, elucidates through examples the conceptual and vocabulary problems users face when searching.  It then shows how a well-structured KOS can assist with search topic clarification (through browsing well-structured hierarchies and guided facet analysis) and with finding good search terms (through query term mapping and synonym and hierarchic query term expansion).  It touches on cross-database and cross-language searching as natural extensions of these functions. It also mentions the use of more richly structured ontologies, including Semantic Web applications. The tutorial then covers the KOS structure needed to support these functions:

• Concept-term relationships for vocabulary control and synonym expansion,
• conceptual structure (semantic analysis, facets, and hierarchy) for topic clarification and hierarchic expansion). 

It illustrates these principles through some sample KOS and KOS-supported DLs and Web sites.

Part 2. Design, evaluation, and development

Introduces criteria for the design and evaluation of KOS and then deals with methods and tools for their development:

• locating sources;
• collecting concepts, terms, and relationships to reuse existing knowledge;
• developing and refining KOS structure;
• software, database structure and Web standards, such as  RDF, TopicMaps, SKOS, OWL;
• collaborative development;
• developing crosswalks / mappings between KOS, and
• resources needed to develop and maintain a KOS.

Dagobert Soergel holds an MS equivalent in mathematics and physics (1964) and a PhD in political science (1970), both from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is Professor of Information Studies, University of Maryland, where he teaches courses in knowledge organization, KOS development, expert systems, and information technology, and an information systems consultant. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Western Ontario, Chicago, and Konstanz, Germany and since 2007 is Professore Onorario, Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, Italy. Among other books, he has authored Organizing Information (1985), which received the American Society of Information Science Best Book Award and Indexing Languages and Thesauri. Construction and Maintenance (1974) as well as numerous papers. He has designed several thesauri, most recently the Alcohol and Other Drug Thesaurus http://etoh.niaaa.nih.gov/AODVol1/Aodthome.htm (for which he chaired the advisory committee) and the Harvard Business Thesaurus (under development). He has developed TermMaster, a thesaurus management software package. In 1997 he received the American Society of Information Science Award of Merit and in 2009 the Contributions to Information Science Award (CISTA) award of the Los Angeles Chapter of ASIST.

--- top ---