NKOS Workshop @ DCMI 2026

On Monday, August 3 an excellent NKOS Workshop was held at DCMI 2026, the international conference on Dublin Core and metadata applications. The Workshop included five presentations on AI-assisted KOS modeling, mapping, indexing and retrieval applications, and a panel discussion with five perspectives on establishing ethical guidelines for use of AI tools in KOS and metadata services. The NKOS Workshop program is available on the DCMI 2026 website. A short Workshop report is available on the NKOS website. The Zoom webinar recording of the NKOS Workshop is also available.

KOS in AI and AI in KOS

A special issue of the journal Knowledge Organization titled “KOS in AI and AI in KOS” has been published at https://www.imrpress.com/journal/KO/special_issues/KOS_AI.In this special issue, five articles have been collected that discuss how KOS are being used or can be used to make automation intelligent. Here is the contents with links to full text:

Report on KM World 2024

KM World is one of the leading knowledge management events, held annually in Washington, D.C. The conference theme – “KM & Enterprise Intelligence: Human or Artificial?” included presentations from vendors, consultants and KM practitioners. There are several co-located events including Taxonomy Boot Camp (where I gave two presentations), Text Analytics Forum, Enterprise Search & Discovery, and Enterprise AI World.

Report on DCMI 2024

DCMI 2024 was hosted by the University of Toronto Faculty of Information from October 19-23.

The theme was “Metadata Innovation: Trust, Transformation, and Humanity.” I served on the Program Committee as the papers co-chair and was integrally involved in planning the program which included keynotes, invited panels, presentations, academic papers, tutorials, workshops, best practice showcases, a student forum, posters, and essential community updates organized into 36 sessions over 5 days. Dublin Core is a small conference that attracts metadata researchers and practitioners to local settings to intermix with and build the local community of practice.

Click here to learn more and watch the day’s presentations

NKOS 2024 Workshop

taxonomy workshop

Since 1997, the NKOS Workshop has been a forum for the presentation, discussion, and improvement of work on the application of knowledge organization systems (KOS) in information services.

The next Workshop will be held at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DCMI2024) on Sunday, October 20 from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM EDT in Toronto, Canada. Participation can be in person or virtual.

The workshop will include demonstrations of working applications and prototypes in action, pre-recorded “live” demos, and the evaluation of results from applications. The demonstrations are organized into four groups—large language models (LLMs), knowledge graphs, machine learning (ML), and AI and KOS.

The fee for in-person participation is included in your DCMI 2024 registration or is $150 for just the NKOS Workshop (registration fee increases after September 19.)

Virtual participation requires registration but is free.

Register for the NKOS Workshop now.

Taxonomy Strategies is a sponsor of DCMI 2024 and the NKOS Workshop. We support and practice standards-based approaches to scalable information management and sustainable information use.

Hope to see you there!

NKOS 2023 Workshop

The recording of the NKOS Workshop is now available. You can watch the entire video here. You can also access individual presentations from the NKOS workshop through this list of presentations:

NKOS Special Issue of TEL

Volume 41 Issue 6 of The Electronic Library (TEL) has been published. Here is the table of contents of the Special Issue: Recent networked knowledge organization systems/services/structures (NKOS) research:

Julaine Clunis. “Enhancing health-care data integration via automated semantic mapping.” https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-06-2023-0142

NKOS 2023 Workshop

The 2023 NKOS Consolidated Workshop will be held as part of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications on November 9 from 9:00 AM-8:00 PM KST at the Kyungpook National University, in Daegu, South Korea. To enable wide global participation, the consolidated workshop will be scheduled as a series of 3-hour sections, each containing two 90-minute sessions to accommodate Asian, American, and European time zones. Participation in the in-person workshop will require registration included with the rest of the Dublin Core conference. (Those only participating in the in-person workshop will pay a small fee to cover lunch and refreshments). Participation in the virtual workshop will require pre-registration to get access to the online sessions but will be free. 

Automated Metadata Annotation Article

The data behind the whizzy new AI technology is no older than the World Wide Web—barely 25 years old. It’s important to acknowledge what type of data a pre-trained machine learning algorithm like ChatGPT has been trained on to understand its limitations and potential biases. For example, scholarly and historical content is often not available in consumable, homogenized, and interoperable formats at the large volume that is required for machine learning. Based on a panel I organized for the 2021 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, MIT Press just published this paper that presents the current state of automated metadata annotation in cultural heritage and research data: M. Wu, H. Brandhorst, M. Marinescu, J. Lopez, M. Hlava, and J. Busch. “Automated metadata annotation: What is and is not possible with machine learning.” 5:1 Data Intelligence (2023) 122–138. https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00162.

Taxonomy and Sustainable Development in Africa

Taxonomy Strategies is providing Business Classification Scheme consultant services for the African Development Bank (AfDB), a multilateral development finance institution. Our focus is to help the Bank implement a document and records management solution. One of the critical bottlenecks in international development is the appraisal and approval of projects. This involves the formation of teams and documentation of project development activities such as alignment with the Paris Climate Accords, gender equality and other Sustainable Development Goals. In developing countries, the size of projects varies widely, but the project budget is often smaller than in developed countries while the needs are greater. This adds up to more projects with smaller budgets that need to be on-boarded and managed. This results in the major documentation and disclosure challenge. 

CFP for NKOS Special Issue of TEL

The call for participation (CFP) for the Recent NKOS Research Special Issue of TEL (The Electronic Library) has been posted at https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-papers/recent-networked-knowledge-organization-systemsservicesstructures-nkos-research. The deadline is May 1, 2023, but submissions may be made from January-May at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tel. On the submission page, please select “Recent Knowledge Organization Systems/Services/Structures (NKOS) Research” as the issue you are submitting to.

NKOS 2022 Workshop Announcement

The 2022 NKOS Workshop will be held as part of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications on October 6-7 from 9-1 PDT at the University of Washington in Seattle. Participation can be in person or virtual. Registration will be free. The NKOS Workshop is seeking submissions for presentations and demonstrations related to Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) themes and topics listed in the Call for Participation (CFP). The submission deadline is Friday, June 17, 2022.

Knowledge Organization Special Issue: Best Papers from NKOS Consolidated Workshop 2020

Joseph Busch is co-guest editor with Joseph Tennis of Special Issue of Knowledge Organization: Best Papers from NKOS Consolidated Workshop 2020 Part 1 48:3 Knowledge Organization (2021) and Part 2 48:4 Knowledge Organization (2021).