Knowledge organization systems (KOS) standards
Marcia Lei Zeng, Margie Hlava, Jian Qin, Gail M. Hodge, Denise Bedford · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2007
Knowledge organization systems (KOS), such as classification schemes, gazetteers, lexical databases, taxonomies thesauri, and ontologies, contribute to the foundation of a whole new generation of websites, intranets, portals, document management systems, and other web-based services. While the digital environment offers more possibilities of presenting information from different interests and discourses, the challenge is as much intellectual as technical when we want to develop KOS that are useful and meaningful for the end-users operating in complex, interdisciplinary knowledge domains. This panel will provide an update of national and international standards that relate to the development and encoding of KOS in the digital environment. For the development of KOS, two standards will be introduced: ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 and BS 8723. These Standards can be regarded as a set of recommendations based on preferred techniques and procedures for constructing different types of KOS, including those emerging in the networked environment as well as the conventional ones which have received renewed attentions as the Semantic Web comes of age. ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies presents guidelines and conventions for the contents, display, construction, testing, maintenance, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies. It focuses on controlled vocabularies that are used for the representation of content objects in knowledge organization systems including lists (sometimes called pick-lists), synonym rings, taxonomies, and thesauri. It also provides guidelines for achieving interoperability between and among knowledge organization systems. Similar work is under way internationally on ISO 2788, Guidelines for the Establishment and Development of Monolingual Thesauri. In the UK, work is under way to revise and extend BS 5723, which is equivalent to ISO 2788. Publication of the new BS 8723: Structured Vocabularies for Information Retrieval – Guide Parts 1 and 2, which cover similar ground as Z39.19, became available in 2005. Parts 3, 4, and 5, expected during 2007, will deal respectively with other vocabularies than thesauri such as classification schemes, business classification schemes for records management, taxonomies, subject heading schemes, and ontologies. It will also cover interoperability between vocabularies as well as protocols and formats for interoperation between vocabularies and other components of information storage and retrieval systems. Beyond these content standards, KOS encoding standards developed and recommended by the W3C, including SKOS and OWL, will also be introduced in this session. These standards are tailored to the needs of web-based applications. The fast growth of KOS in web-based applications has seen a trend of smaller but highly specific, grassroots knowledge organization systems. The encoding standards will be an important step to rein in this wild development so that KOS in various domains may be expressed in interchangeable formats. SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is a set of specifications supporting the use of KOS within the framework of the Semantic Web. SKOS Core is an RDF vocabulary for describing concept schemes of KOS. There are three RDF vocabularies under active development: SKOS Core Guide, SKOS Core Vocabulary Specification, and Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web. The OWL Web Ontology Language, a W3C Recommendation, is intended to be used when the information contained in documents needs to be processed by applications, as opposed to situations where the content needs to be presented only to humans. OWL can be used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between those terms. By providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics, OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema. The panel will also initiate a discussion regarding the implementation of these standards in government, not-for-profit, and industry projects, especially the use of these standards and their integration with other standards, such as ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registries (MDR) standard. The panel targets the following groups of information professionals: (1) those who are engaged in, or contemplating, the initiation of activities in developing KOS, (2) those who are designing KOS for a wider audience and incorporating various types of KOS, and (3) those who assist users in information retrieval across various domains, languages, and communities that use different KOS and encoding systems.