What do knowledge organisation professionals do? One thing was obvious from the 2015 IKO conference - KO professionals are engaged in a wide variety of activities. I could list all 15 case studies, as each had something valuable to impart but just a few give a flavour of this diversity:
• The BBC and the National Library Board of Singapore are building frameworks with Linked Data to not only open up their content to the general public but connect their content to other sources to provide a richer and more holistic user experience.
• Search Explained and Flax are applying search technologies both inside and outside the enterprise to make content more accessible for their clients.
• PebbleRoad were out observing how users actually do their jobs rather than just assuming the problems they faced were obvious, and designing apps that connected them to the data needed to support their tasks
• Straits Knowledge was working with graph databases to develop knowledge maps capable of being analysed for taxonomy-building
• Synaptica was building a Linked Data-ready image annotation system so that rich knowledge bases could be built around detailed images.
One way of understanding this complexity is to map out the skills that practitioners require to successfully implement projects like these. Any such mapping attempt will be always be provisional and subject to change. Such a mapping will have to find a balance between between having too little detail to be useful and too much detail to be manageable. And such a mapping faces the risks of any taxonomy that is being applied to taxonomists, such as differences in terminology and organising frameworks. Read the rest of this article here.
• The BBC and the National Library Board of Singapore are building frameworks with Linked Data to not only open up their content to the general public but connect their content to other sources to provide a richer and more holistic user experience.
• Search Explained and Flax are applying search technologies both inside and outside the enterprise to make content more accessible for their clients.
• PebbleRoad were out observing how users actually do their jobs rather than just assuming the problems they faced were obvious, and designing apps that connected them to the data needed to support their tasks
• Straits Knowledge was working with graph databases to develop knowledge maps capable of being analysed for taxonomy-building
• Synaptica was building a Linked Data-ready image annotation system so that rich knowledge bases could be built around detailed images.
One way of understanding this complexity is to map out the skills that practitioners require to successfully implement projects like these. Any such mapping attempt will be always be provisional and subject to change. Such a mapping will have to find a balance between between having too little detail to be useful and too much detail to be manageable. And such a mapping faces the risks of any taxonomy that is being applied to taxonomists, such as differences in terminology and organising frameworks. Read the rest of this article here.
By Matt Moore