Participants in Networked Knowledge Organization
Systems/Services (as of March 14, 2000)
(back to Workshop
page)
Abbing, Ralph
Allard, Suzie
Ardoe, Anders
Babamov, Vasil
Bargmeyer, Bruce
Bartolo, Laura M.
Bechhofer, Sean
Bedford, Denise A. D.
Betz,
Anne
Bivona, Eric J.
Blum, Stan
Busch, Joseph A.
Chipman, Alison
Daniel Jr., Ron
Davies, Ron
DiPietro, Deanne
Doerr, Martin
Domenico, Ben
Eliasen, Karen
Futornick, Michelle
Gagnon, Stuart
Geber, Ecaterina
Goble, Carole
Hammond, Joel
Hart, Quinn
Hill, Linda
Hodge, Gail
Hower, Paul
Koch, Traugott
Laurent, Sciboz
Lehmann, Fritz
Lima, Tarcisio
Lussier, Steve
Maguire, Marsha
Markham, Jim
Méndez. Eva
Miller, Paul
Milstead, Jessica
Nair, Gopi
Nolting, Daniel
Ostergren, Marilyn
Pease, Bill
Prescott, Leah
Purat, Jacek
Raugh, Michael
Schwartz, Candy
Shiri, Ali Asghar
Soergel, Dagobert
Spasser, Mark
Spencer, Linda Hill
Staples, Thornton
Starr, Lori J.
Theobald,
Matt
Thomas, Judith
Thompson, Roger
Treesh, Erica
Tudhope, Douglas
Vizine-Goetz, Diane
Vogel, Claude
Vogel, Ron
Weland, Madi
White, Richard
Zeng, Marcia Lei
Zhang, Paul
Ralph Abbing
is a graduated computer scientist from Duisburg University (Germany) working
at the European Patent Office in The Hague, Netherlands, as a examiner
in the field G06f17/30 (Databases and Information Retrieval) for several
years now. Before that he has been working at a German university at the
technology transfer office, helping and assisting computer scientist to
get national and international funding. (added 8/17/99)
Homepage of the EPO: http://www.european-patent-office.org
Email: rabbing@epo.nl
Suzie Allard
is a doctoral student in the College of Communications and Information
Science at the University of Kentucky working with Dr. Donald Case. Her
professional background includes 18 years as a media consultant studying
end-user reaction to various stimuli. Her research interests are human
communication through electronic channels leading to integration of knowledge
across disciplinary barriers. She has joined this group to learn.
(added 8/17/99)
Homepage: http://sac.uky.edu/~slalla0/index.html
Email: slalla0@pop.uky.edu
Anders Ardoe
has a background in Computer Systems with a Ph.D. 1986 from Lund University.
He has been working with networked computers since 1980 and during 1986
- 1994 as Ass. Professor in Computer Engineering at Lund University. The
last years he has been involved in introducing the concept of networked
information in libraries. Since 1992 he is working with developing electronic
library services first at Lund University Library, Development Department
(LUB NetLab) were he was department head from 1994 - 1996. From 1996 he
is head of development at the Technical Knowledge Center & Library
of Denmark. The European Union projects he is currently involved in are:
DESIRE II, UNIverse, GAIA and EULER. (See statement with Traugott Koch).
Homepage: http://nwi.dtv.dk/anders/
Email: and@dtv.dk
Vasil Babamov
is the Editor of the Chemical Abstracts Thesaurus. He oversees
the development of the Thesaurus, which currently has about 15,000
preferred terms, and its integration into the building of the CA database.
A particularly concern is the implications that the expanded networked
applications of thesauri will have on the development of the thesaurus
structure and content to ensure that the thesaurus remains a useful tool
for purposes beyond its traditional implementation. Another concern
is with providing networked thesaurus access to the analysts involved in
building the database and maximizing the benefits of using the thesaurus
in the database building process. The CA Thesaurus is presently
fully accessible only internally: on STN via the existing STN thesaurus
software; via an Intranet web-based hypertext thesaurus tool; and via a
couple of internally developed tools that partially integrate the thesaurus
into the database building process. We are anticipating incorporating
the thesaurus into the public access to the CA database on STN, the web-based
STN-easy and Scifinder that provide access to multiple databases, and into
other planned CAS products. Additional work needs to be done on the thesaurus
to enable automatic backfile search in light of the major changes our vocabulary
has undergone. The only public assess to the thesaurus is a restricted
version of the internal web thesaurus hypertext tool that provides only
a listing of the thesaurus terms. This listing can be accessed at: http://www.cas.org/vocabulary/
. Dr. Babamov received a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University
of Illinois in 1977 and was engaged in research and teaching in that field
at several universities before joining Chemical Abstracts as a Scientific
Information Analyst in 1986.
Email: vbabamov@cas.org
Bruce Bargmeyer
is a Computer Scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and
Guest Researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Bruce is chair of the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 (Data Management and Interchange)
and vice chair of the NCITS L8 group for Data Representation. Bruce is
interested in the use of metadata registries for knowledge organization
services. Current operational and research work involves the Environmental
Data Registry www.epa.gov/edr,
the EPA Terminology Reference System www.epa.gov/trs
and the Environmental Data Exchange Network (EDEN). EDEN is a collaborative
effort between the European Environment Agency, the Environmental Protection
Agency, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Energy. It
involves work on standardizing metadata and includes a demonstration of
the use of an ontology for querying widely distributed databases using
request brokers, agents, mediators, and related intelligent information
services technology. (added 8/17/99)
Email: bargmeyer.bruce@epamail.epa.gov
Laura M. Bartolo
is an Associate Professor in Libraries and Media Services at Kent State
University. Her primary focus in the ALCOM/NIST Heterogeneous Structures
Project is network-accessible information description and retrieval. Specific
groups of terms in related areas have been developed among the scientists
with the growth of the Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials (ALCOM) subject
domain. A next step in the project is to develop a knowledge organization
structure related to liquid crystal research building upon the thesaurus
and classification tools in place. The knowledge structure will incorporate
the multiple domains represented within the project, the interests and
needs of applied and basic research, and will capitalize on distributed
information services.
Email: lbartolo@kent.edu
Sean Bechhofer
is a Research Fellow in the Information Management Group at the University
of Manchester. He received a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from Bristol University
in 1988 and has been a researcher in the University of Manchester Department
of Computer Science since 1993, working initially with the Medical Informatics
Group on the GALEN project (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig/galen).
His main research interests are in the applications of description logics,
particularly as a delivery mechanism for terminologies and semantic metadata,
and their use in indexing and retrieval. He is currently involved with
the STARCH (http://potato.cs.man.ac.uk/starch)
and TAMBIS (http://img.cs.man.ac.uk/tambis)
projects. STARCH is concerned with using DL models to support querying
over picture archives, while TAMBIS uses a conceptual model to provide
unified access to multiple biological information sources. [added 11/20/98]
Email: seanb@cs.man.ac.uk
Homepage: http://potato.cs.man.ac.uk/seanb/
Denise A. D. Bedford
is currently Thesaurus Manager/Developer for The World Bank in Washington,
DC. She is responsible for the development of the forthcoming
1998 edition of The World Bank Group's Thesaurus. The Thesaurus takes
the form of electronic and print editions, as well as serving as the intelligence
behind the "smart" RetrievalWare search engine. She has earned Ph.D. (Information
Science, UC Berkeley), MS (Librarianship, Western Michigan University),
MA and BA (Russian; German; History, University of Michigan).
Other employment highlights include: Catholic University of
America (Adjunct Faculty), Intel Corporation, NASA GSFC and STI Program,
Stanford University, University of California Systemwide Administration,
University of Michigan, as well as consulting projects for International
Monetary Fund, and federal agencies.
Objectives for the workshop: (1) learn which of the NISO-defined
thesaurus relationships other organizations and researchers are using in
mapping thesaurus content to semantic network structures, as well as relationships
in use beyond this set; (2) determine whether there is practical
consistency in the naming conventions for semantic relationships, and (3)
learn how other organizations have "packaged" semantic network relationships
to search strategies for end-users.
Email: dbedford@worldbank.org
Anne Betz graduated
in Library and Information Studies at the University of Applied Sciences
in Cologne, Germany, Department of
Library and Information Studies (LIS), in September 1997. From October
1997 on she is working half-time at DEUTERM, the recently founded German
Information and Documentation Centre for Terminology. DEUTERM
is to represent the German node in a European Terminology Documentation
Centre Network (TDC-net) being established in the course of a European
Union project which started in August this year. The TDC-net Project is
an activity within the framework of the European MLIS
Programme (MultiLingual Information Society).
"In general, my interest in the NKOS initiative is exchanging professional
information on a high level and learning more about the methodical and
technical aspects of realizing multilingual access to databases and Web
sites by means of controlled vocabulary systems. As DEUTERM offers
a list of thesauri, thesaurus maintenance software and classification schedules
browsable by languages and by subject (http://www.fbi.fh-koeln.de/labor/Bir/thesauri_new/indexen.htm)
which is to be represented by means of systematic categories one day, I
am especially interested in the discussion about and the development of
the Thesaurus Registry." (added 10/23/98)
e-mail: anne.betz@fh-koeln.de
Eric J. Bivona
is a Senior Programmer in the Information Systems group at Dartmouth College.
Eric has been involved with the development of Z39.50, and network information
systems at Dartmouth. (added 8/17/99)
Email Eric.J.Bivona@Dartmouth.EDU
Stan Blum is the
Research Information Manager at the California Academy of Sciences, San
Francisco. By academic training he is a systematic ichthyologist (the classification
of fishes; Ph.D. Zoology, University of Hawaii, 1988). Since 1990, however,
he has been working full-time in biodiversity and natural history collections
informatics. The two most important themes in his work have been: 1) designing
integrated information systems for natural history museums (i.e., systems
that support a wide variety of collection disciplines, collection management
practices, and uses of collection information), and 2) developing data
standards and software architectures that will enable data to be integrated
across distributed and heterogeneous collection databases. He recently
organized "A Workshop on the Compilation, Maintenance, and Dissemination
of Taxonomic Authority Files." The purpose of the workshop was to provide
an initial forum for members of the systematics and library/information
science communities to discuss concepts, practices, and technologies that
will promote consistency in the cataloging, indexing, and retrieval of
biological information. Workshop results indicated that biological taxonomy
and classification would provide a challenging test bed for cross-discipline
work involving thesaurus development, authority control, cooperative cataloging,
and multi-thesaurus integration. Participants recommended that the dialog
between the communities continue, particularly under the framework of DL
research. (Added 8/3/98; updated 3/4/99.)
Email: sblum@calacademy.org
Taxonomic Authority Files Workshop website: http://research.calacademy.org/taf/
California Academy of Sciences website: http://www.calacademy.org
Joseph A. Busch is currently
the Vice President for Information Product Development at Metacode Technologies,
Inc., a software company developing search and content management products that
integrate metathesaurus and metadata technologies. Prior to joining Metacode
in 1998, Mr. Busch was the Getty Information Institute's program manager for
standards and resources projects including the Art & Architecture Thesaurus
and Thesaurus of Geographic Names. His domain experience ranges from the arts
and humanities to business and law. Over the past 25 years as an information
professional, he has worked in a wide variety of institutional settings including
academic, private, and public libraries, as well as management consulting organizations.
Mr. Busch organized and led the DL 97 workshop on Metadata and Thesauri. He
is currently the President-elect of the American Society for Information Science
(http://www.asis.org/). Metacode is working
to operationalize cross-domain metathesaurus technology as an incremental distributed
resource. As such, Metacode aims to be a leader in the development of standards
to support this objective, and an early implementor of them. To support this
goal, Metacode is a member of the W3C, and has a particular interest in developing
XML architectures. (revised 3/14/00)
Metacode website: http://www.metacode.com/
Email: JBusch@metacode.com
Alison Chipman
is an editor at the Getty Information Institute Vocabulary Program. Specifically
she is the editor primarily (not solely) responsible for the Art &
Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). Discussions at the scholarly/professional
level (or any for that matter) on topics relating to the creation, distribution,
and use of thesauri are of vital interest to her and her Program. In particular,
they are concerned with the topic of online, Internet, and other electronic
applications of thesauri, and how the unique and powerful features of their
semantic structure can be fully utilized in information retrieval. The
NKOS list offers a chance to listen in and participate in just such discussions.
(added July 13, 1998)
Email: AChipman@getty.edu
Ron Daniel Jr.
is a Senior Information Scientist at DATAFUSION, Inc. - a start-up software
company developing knowledge management products that integrate metathesaurus,
metadata, and systems modeling technologies. Prior to joining DATAFUSION,
Ron was a Technical Staff Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where
he began his active participation in the working groups that produced the
RDF specifications. Ron has also been active in the Dublin Core
and URN efforts. He is currently active in the XML Linking standardization
effort, where he is co-editor of the XPointer specification draft and chairs
the associated interest group. (added July 6, 1999)
Email: rdaniel@datafusion.net
Ron Davies is
Senior Systems Librarian at the International Labour Office in Geneva Switzerland,
a UN specialized agency that has published the ILO Thesaurus for more than
twenty years. As a consultant with Bibliomatics, Inc. from 1987 to 1999,
he designed and developed thesaurus management systems for the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris) and the International
Development Research Centre (Ottawa), and led a project to create a subject
classification system for United Nation's
information available over the Internet. (revised 7/9/99)
Email: davies@ilo.org
Deanne DiPietro
is Technical Projects Coordinator for the California Resources Agency's
CERES Program, the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System.
The goal of CERES is to facilitate access to environmental data and information,
and one of the major efforts toward this goal is the development of information
cataloging and indexing technology for use on the World Wide Web. Deanne's
role with CERES is in user interface design and partnership project coordination,
as well as assisting in directing the efforts of the web development and
programming team. She is co-lead with Quinn Hart in CERES' partnership
with the USGS Biological Resource Division to develop an environmental
theme thesaurus for linking distributed thesauri, and an application programming
interface for accessing and manipulating descriptors from the distributed
thesauri.
Email: deanne@ceres.ca.gov
CERES: http://ceres.ca.gov
CERES Thesaurus page: http://ceres.ca.gov/thesaurus
CERES Catalog page: http://ceres.ca.gov/catalog
Martin Doerr
is a Senior Application Scientist with the Centre for Cultural Informatics
and Documentation Systems, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for
Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece. He works
on thesaurus management, ontologies and heterogeneous data access in close
cooperation with cultural bodies and library organisations.
"Based on my experience from classification methods in software repositories,
and with semantic network-based cultural documentation systems, I have
led the development of a proof-of-concept prototype for a new vocabulary
management system for the Getty Information Institute (former AHIP) in
Los Angeles. This system demonstrated the capability of the Semantic Index
System, product of ICS-FORTH, to manage effectively amounts of hundreds
of thousands of terminological records in various schemata. With the AQUARELLE
project as test bed, we have developed this prototype into a competitive
thesaurus management system for multilingual thesauri, the "SIS-TMS". Its
novel features is a partitioning and versioning mechanism, which allows
for consistent cooperative development by semi-autonomous groups and integration
of distributed "terminology servers" into heterogeneous
information environments. It is on product level since summer 1998,
and has already found vivid interest in Greece, France, England, and Italy
and at the European Commission.
"Recently, I have initiated and participate in the European Term-IT
project in the Language Engineering Sector of TELEMATICS, which aims at
combining language engineering and human processes for the more efficient
production of terminological resources in the cultural domain. My interest
in thesauri is complementary to my work on conceptual structures with respect
to the general problem of information mediation in heterogenuous distributed
environments. I do research and have published on questions of knowledge
representation, cooperative development of thesauri and knowledge resources,
effective information access and architectures for heterogeneous distributed
information environments.
"I am member of ICOM-CIDOC and involved in the development of a domain
ontology for the museums community, the oo CIDOC Reference Model, going
to be presented in October in Melbourne." (added 9/9/98)
Some references:
P.Constantopoulos, M.Doerr, "Component Classification in the Software
Information Base", appeared in : O.Nierstrasz, D.Tsichritzis, "Object-Oriented
Software Composition", Prentice Hall, England, 1996
M. Doerr, "Reference Information Acquisition and Coordination", in:
"ASIS'97 -Digital Collections: Implications for Users, Funders, Developers
and Maintainers", Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the American
Society for Information Sciences, "
November 1-6 '97, Washington, Vol.34. Information Today Inc.: Medford,
New Jersey, 1997. ISBN 1-57387-048-X.
M. Doerr, I. Fundulaki, "SIS-TMS, A Thesaurus Management System for
Distributed Digital Collections", Second European Conference on Digital
Libraries, Heraklion, Sept. 1998, to be published.
I.Dionissiadou, M.Doerr, "Mapping of material culture to a semantic
network", in : Automating Museums in the Americas and Beyond, Sourcebook,
ICOM-MCN Joint Annual Meeting, August 28-September 3, 1994
Doerr M. (1996). "Authority services in global information spaces".
Heraklion - Crete, Greece: FORTH, Institute of Computer Science - Technical
Report FORTH-ICS/TR-163. also on: Workshop for Networked Information Retrieval,
SIGIR '96, Zurich, August 1996 (http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/Publications/TechnicalReports.html)
Martin Doerr, Irini Fundulaki "The Aquarelle Terminology Service", ERCIM
News Number 33, April1998, p14-15
M. Doerr and I. Fundulaki. "A proposal on extended interthesaurus links"
Technical Report ICS-FORT/TR-215, March 1998.
Email: martin@ics.forth.gr
Website: http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/
Ben Domenico
is Deputy Director of the Unidata Program. Unidata (University Data) provides
software and systems which enable nearly 200 participating university departments
to receive, analyze, and display real-time environmental data from a variety
of sources (weather station observations from around the world, satellite
imagery, data from weather radars, lightning strike observation, output
from supercomputer weather prediction models, weather observations from
instruments on commercial aircraft, etc.). More recently, he has
been involved in setting up a related program (PAGE, the Program for Advancement
of Geosciences Education) which has recently received NSF funding to set
up a Geosciences Digital Library (GDL). I am hoping to learn about
the important relevant current technologies that will enable PAGE to accomplish
its objectives for the GDL. (added 8/12/99)
Email: ben@unidata.ucar.edu
Karen Eliasen
leads Microsoft's vocabulary and meta-schema team within the Information
Services Knowledge Architecture Group. This work involves creating
a corporate-wide set of controlled vocabularies that support search, browse,
tagging, publishing, news push, and other features on a corporate intranet
consisting of over 2 million documents. In addition to building vocabularies,
the Knowledge Architecture team is working with other groups across Microsoft
to integrate existing thesauri, taxonomies, authority lists, and metadata
schemata with a registry that will make necessary translations and connections
among these various elements. Karen's special interest is measuring the
value added by vocabulary control and schema utilization using both quantitative
and qualitative methods. (revised 7/7/99)
Email: karenel@microsoft.com
Michelle Futornick
is Senior Catalog Analyst at Aeneid Corporation in San Francisco, where
she develops taxonomies for organizing Web resources. Aeneid is building
a network of vertical portals to give business professionals access to
the most recent and relevant industry-specific information. Before joining
Aeneid, Michelle was an Editor at the Getty Information Institute, where
she worked on three thesauri that are widely used in the documentation
and retrieval of networked cultural heritage information. Michelle has
a Master's in Library and Information Studies from the University of California
at Berkeley. (revised 7/16/99)
Email: mfutornick@aeneid.com
Stuart Gagnon,
Internet Librarian for Terminology Projects, works as a contractor with
GCI Information Services for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
at the EPA Headquarters Information Resources Center. A graduate
of UNC-CH School of Information and Library Science (SILS), he has worked
in libraries and/or with databases for over 5 years. He recently
supported development efforts for an EPA metadata catalog which will provide
enhanced access to the Agency's Web resources. [This metadata catalog
is currently in an Intranet production phase.] Mr. Gagnon leads a
small team of Internet librarians who support the work of EPA's Enterprise
Information Management Division (EIMD) in their efforts to assist the European
Environment Agency (EEA) in upgrading their thesaurus product, GEneral
Multilingual Environment Thesaurus (GEMET). He also leads the
team's efforts on a collaborative project between EIMD and the EPA Superfund
Information Management Center (IMC) which would integrate a coordinated
electronic tool in which related information, including data, subject terminology
and metadata, will be collected and shared between many systems, across
the Web. State-level agencies that collect hazardous waste clean-up
(Superfund-related) data will be invited to participate in this project
that is designed to enhance the collection of similar data, help in the
building of new databases and drive search engines. The project includes
a working component that would allow users to query disparate legacy databases
in a networked environment. Components of this project are: the Environmental
Data Exchange Network (EDEN), the Environmental Data Registry (EDR) and
the Terminology Reference System (TRS). This project espouses a 'registry'
approach
to standardization. [added 4/9/99]
Email: gagnon.stuart@epa.gov
Ecaterina Geber
is
carrying out research in the area of Intellectual Access to Cultural Information
at CHIN. Her work at ARTEXPO Foundation and the Information Center for
Culture and Heritage Romania, for over 15 years, focused on three main
areas: definition of communication and information sharing procedures,
data modeling and development of standards, access to and integration of
resources in a distributed multicultural environment. Ecaterina was responsible
for the design implementation, administration and evolution of the Romanian
National Cultural Heritage Information System from over 300 cultural institutions
in Romania. Ecaterina initiated and managed the development of a series
of CD-ROMs and imaging projects focusing on cultural topics.
The launch of ARTEFACTS CANADA in April, 1998 by the Canadian Heritage
Information Network (CHIN) signaled the first step towards integrated access
to information about objects held in Canadian museum collections. Artefacts
Canada, formerly the National Inventories, is the product of decades of
collaboration between the Canadian museum community and CHIN, and contains
millions of records describing objects, natural science specimens and archaeological
sites. Effective access into an information environment containing a diversity
of resources and over twenty million of information items strongly revealed
the necessity of terminology and classification tools to support both description
and retrieval.
The integration of The Art & Architecture Thesaurus with Artefacts
Canada is one of the most significant improvements to access and retrieval.
The thesaurus, used as a behind-the-scenes retrieval tool, enables access
to objects through hierarchies. This integration has permitted a conceptual
structure, that embeds art history knowledge, to be applied to the terminology
used in the existing information collections, without the need to modify
the resource itself or to impose vocabulary or category structures on those
participating in the building of this collective resource. The architecture
enables the potential addition of other authorities and organized information
resources, including geographical or temporal perspectives, or offering
alternative views for search results categorization.
To enable access in both French and English, a multilingual thesaurus
was developed using The Art & Architecture Thesaurus as a base. The
most frequently used terms in the Humanities database were identified and
a French equivalent term was defined. Currently, there are 2,600 French
terms available and active during the retrieval process.
Email: Kati_Geber@pch.gc.ca
Carole Goble
is affiliated with the University of Manchester U.K. Her work over the
last eight years has been in clinical technologies and controlled vocabularies
and in the last two years on terminologies for works of art. They use Descriptor
Logics and terminological reasoning to build self-organizing compositional
schemes. She is just starting to work on a funded project in collaboration
with the Getty Images to classify the subjects of the Hulton-Getty Picture
Archive.
Email: carole@cs.man.ac.uk
Joel Hammond is
in the Abstracting and Indexing Department for BIOSIS. He was instrumental
in the design of the new BIOSIS relational indexing system.
EMail: jkhammond@mail.biosis.org
Quinn Hart is
a Technical Researcher for the California Resources Agency's CERES Program,
the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System. Quinn is
responsible for review and implementation of standards and applications
relating to metadata, indexing, and cataloging issues. CERES' thesaurus
project is part of an effort to standardize the language used when
indexing, and searching for environmental data products in California.
In addition to the generation of a thesaurus of environmental terms, CERES
is developing a toolkit that will allow for distributed access to thesauri
in a consistent manner for application development. This toolkit
is based on an object-oriented paradigm, abstracting a thesaurus into a
set of objects and methods. A toolkit in PERL has been developed and one
for JAVA is underway.
Email: quinn@ucdavis.edu
CERES: http://ceres.ca.gov
CERES Thesaurus page: http://ceres.ca.gov/thesaurus
Linda L. Hill
is a Research Specialist with the Alexandria Digital Library Project at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked extensively
with thesaurus and metadata development and digital library projects. She
has worked extensively with gazetteer design and implementation as interactive
digital library services. Part of the gazetteer work has included the development
of a Thesaurus of Feature Types.
"My personal goal in relation to this workshop is to get thesaurus principles
and practices enabled within digital libraries so that existing thesauri
can be more known and accessible, so that developing projects will recognize
the value of the thesaurus approach and will develop and use thesauri according
to established standards. Also, to evaluate the usefulness of thesauri
and classification systems for networked information discovery."
Alexandria Digital Library website: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu
Email: lhill@alexandria.ucsb.edu
Homepage: www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill
Gail Hodge, Information
International Associates (IIa), has been involved with production systems
for abstracting/indexing services for 20 years. She's currently working
as a consultant to USGS on a biodiversity vocabulary for the National Biological
Information Infrastructure (NBII). She previously held positions with the
NASA Center for AeroSpace Information and with Biosis.
"My main goal is to promote this discussion at a high level so that
what we do within the U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division
(BRD) context is based on where we are within the technical community.
We know that we can't wait until all the problems are solved, but we want
to be in synch as much as possible. We need an understanding of the issues
involved in using distributed thesauri: How do we handle rights management,
authentication, etc. and charging for commercial databases? What will users
want to do with these distributed thesauri? This effects navigation,
searching, "transfer," etc. What do we need to know about other thesauri
and vocabularies in order to use them in a distributed fashion? Is a registry
both of thesaurus elements and of particular thesauri necessary to this
effort? Where does this effort intersect with the efforts of others: RDF,
XML, metadata schema, metadata registries, Z39.19, Z39.50, search engine
vendors, etc.? I would like to come out of this with at least a start toward
a way to deal with the architecture so that we can move forward and integrate
this effort with other metadata and Internet efforts."
National Biological Information Infrastructure website: http://www.nbii.gov/
Email: gailhodge@aol.com
Paul Hower is
with Intermedia Marketing & Production, Inc. in Atlanta. He says: "My
first brush with information science was when I took courses at the UC
Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies in 1977. After turning
down a generous offer by Dr. Maron to stay at Berkeley, I went on to get
a Masters degree in something called "Interactive Telecommunications" at
NYU. The philosophy of that program was to provide students with the requisite
tools and knowledge to understand all aspects of interactive services,
from the technical and social to the legal and economic. This background
has served me well as an IT consultant, corporate manager and in my own
businesses.
I have enjoyed something of a retirement for the past few years, but
have continued to consult at the request of associates and referrals. IMP's
latest client is Consumers Union - the non-profit publisher of Consumer
Reports - who hired us to help them understand "post Web site" Internet
opportunities. We are urging them to keep an eye on developments affecting
the "semantic interoperability" of the Internet, and have described how
metadata, vocabulary control and personal 'bots' may change the way people
shop over the next 5 years - and the way information providers like CU
distribute their wares.
While I am most interested in what [which] users will want to do with
[what] thesauri, dictionaries, etc., my background inclines me to be curious
about the other 'straw topics' as well. One topic of interest not mentioned
in the workshop's advance materials is the interaction of human-generated
with machine-generated vocabularies. Might strengths of the one correct
weaknesses in the other? Should current work on standards consider how
these discrete technologies may interoperate in the future?
I am currently a member of the ACM and SIGIR, and will be attending
DL '98. I hope it is still possible to participate in the workshop, because
it seems like a rare opportunity to meet with a geographically dispersed
group of people face to face."
Email: hower@mindspring.com
Phone: 404-256-1313
Traugott Koch
is Senior librarian, Electronic Information Services at NetLab, Lund University
Library Development Department, Sweden. He has developed digital library
services during the last six years in European, Nordic and Swedish projects
(among others the European DESIRE project and the Nordic Metadata Project).
The focus in these projects is on resource discovery and retrieval, on
resource description and metadata, knowledge organization, indexing and
search services. During 1998 he is visiting scholar at OCLC Office of Research,
Dublin, OH, working on problems in the intersection between metadata production,
automatic classification and the retrievability of highly qualified subject
information from heterogeneous Internet and metadata databases. He is a
member of the Dublin Core Policy Advisory Committee.
We (Traugott and Anders Ardoe) expect
the workshop to start an initial discussion on what vocabulary related
operations have to be agreed upon as a basis for standards for using (distributed)
vocabulary support over the Internet. In addition an orientation would
be valuable what syntaxes and formats are promising for the task to encode
and exchange the data. We hope a working group will be started to further
this and related tasks.
Digital library research description: dl98ws-applfinal.html
Homepage: http://www.ub2.lu.se/koch.html
Email: Traugott.Koch@ub2.lu.se
Sciboz Laurent
is in charge of the research institute ICARE from the School of Engineering
of Valais, Switzerland. Current work, Harmony Village Project, stresses
the design and implementation of information business systems with a focus
on integrating knowledge organization systems with specific information
retrieval systems. (added 8/17/99)
Homepage of the Harmony Project : http://www.harmony-village.com
Email: laurent.sciboz@icare.ch
Fritz Lehmann
is interested in formal conceptual descriptions of geographic concepts,
and in cross-linking different standards, ontologies, gazetteer-formats,
thesauri, and data dictionaries to each other accurately. He is Senior
Ontologist at Cycorp (creators of the Cyc common-sense knowledge program),
in Austin, Texas, and does outside consulting on ontologies and automated
information integration. He has an ongoing personal project to cross-link
the feature terms (and concepts and encodings) used in all major geographic
information systems, databases, and thesauri, along with terms for concepts
like organizations, persons, titles etc. that might be used in any address
(postal or electronic) worldwide. (He isn't trying to do that for instance
data, just for the feature types, concepts and data elements.) He
recently proposed adding (optional) formal logical concept descriptions
to the ISO 11179 Data Element registry standard. (added 4/20/99)
Email(in 1999): fritz@cyc.com
Tarcisio Lima
is, from Aug/98 to Aug/2000, a Visiting Faculty at the LSDIS (Large-Scale
Distributed Information Systems Lab), at
the Computer Science Department of the UGA (University of Georgia).
His MS and PhD backgrounds are in the database area and his primary interest
is semantic integration and correlation of information. His research is
now directed towards the ADL/ADEPT projects (Alexandria Digital Library/Alexandria
Digital Earth Prototype Modeling System), where he is coordinating the
implementation of the 'iscapes' (information landscapes), a collection
of semantically related information assets, along with the ways to analyze
and visualize them, that facilitate learning about the Digital Earth. His
interest in the NKOS workshop is discussing the information integration
in DL's using ontologies/meta thesauri inter-relationships across multiple
learning domains. (added 8/12/99)
Email: tarcisio@cs.uga.edu
Steve Lussier
is a Master's student in UC Berkeley's School of Information Management
and Systems (SIMS), where he is studying the
development of digital libraries and documents, user interface design
methods, and other shifting targets in informatics. He is interested
in the promise
of XML and RDF for combining flexibility with standardization in information
systems. He has had the opportunity to work this past Spring and
Summer with Dr. Stanley Blum at the California Academy of Sciences,
deploying Academy collections-related databases, mostly of taxonomic
specimen collections, on the Web, and doing planning and analysis
toward the development of authority files and the resolution of other database
integration issues.
"I believe the ongoing development of metadata and schema standards,
in combination with work on thesauri and ontologies, will enable researchers
especially but by no means exclusively in the sciences to pursue new
kinds of in-depth collaboration as well as solo research. One area
that has my
attention is bioinformatics (see http://www.eionet.eu.int/gbif/
for a current initiative). I'm really interested in a whole raft
of changes facing academic
and scientific information-sharing. I suspect that we're going
to see some disciplinary boundaries being rewritten as the task of integrating
information
resources across those boundaries becomes a (relatively) more transparent
one. Helping enable those kinds of innovations while respecting the
complexity of the data is my goal. I'm attending this (1999)
NKOS workshop to learn more about what people are up to and how I can contribute."
(added 8/13/99)
Email: slussier@sims.berkeley.edu
Marsha Maguire
is the Collections Librarian at the Experience Music Project, The Experience
Music Project is an interactive, music-related museum opening next year
at Seattle Center. We (specifically, a team consisting of EMP librarians,
programmers, and digitization and web technologists) are in the early stages
of designing a digital library consisting of still images of our collections
artifacts, and audio and moving image files made from our sound recordings
and videos. We hope to link these digital reproductions to our catalog
records as well as to additional information prepared by the staff (interactive
exhibit labels, kiosk presentations, web pages, etc.) and maybe OCR-scanned
text such as notes, clippings, and the like.
EMP is developing an in-house thesaurus based on the Art & Architecture
Thesaurus and incorporating ANSI thesaurus construction standards, although
we have not yet linked the thesaurus database (which utilizes Liu Palmer's
commercial thesaurus construction software) to our collections catalog
database (an in-house, networked SQL Server database with Microsoft Access
input forms and reporting capabilities} -- although we expect to redesign
that database soon. Work on the creation of name authority records
has begun; these will be based on, but not always adhere to, AACR2/MARC.
Name authority records will be structured hierarchically to an extent,
since we'll be creating authority records for, say, rock bands and the
individual members of those bands, and providing links to other bands in
which those musicians have performed. We have not developed a search interface
yet, but are hoping to develop a very user-friendly searching/browsing/linking
system to offer visitors to the museum, serious researchers, and users
of the World Wide Web. We're interested in how Z39.50, XML, and other emerging
standards might improve access not only to our digital resources, but to
the vast store of cultural information held by institutions throughout
the world.
Email: marsham@experience.org
Website: www.experience.org
Jim Markham
has been the Aquatic Sciences/Biology/German Librarian, as well as the
Original Cataloger for Science and German at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, since 1986. In his first career, he was
a grant-supported research marine botanist (Ph.D. University of British
Columbia) at UBC, Vancouver, B.C.; NRC Canada Atlantic Regional Lab, Halifax,
N.S.; and Biologische Anstalt Helgoland, Helgoland, Germany.
Since 1985 he has been a member of IAMSLIC (International Association
of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers) and since
1987 Chair of the IAMSLIC Coordinating Committee on Subject Analysis. The
CCSA is concerned with the ASFIS (Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Information
System) Thesaurus, which is used for indexing and searching the international
database Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA), as well as for
cataloging of aquatic science materials in many countries where Library
of Congress Subject Headings are not used. The ASFIS Thesaurus is the most
widely used thesaurus worldwide for aquatic
science. The Committee was formed as a result of a paper presented
by Jim Markham at IAMSLIC 1987, comparing Library of Congress Subject Headings
with the ASFIS Thesaurus, for the benefit of catalogers who find the ASFIS
Thesaurus more appropriate for aquatic or marine science materials, but
are required by cataloging rules to use LCSH when cataloging these materials.
The Committee was formed October 1987 with the following charges:
"1. To act as a clearinghouse and lobbying focus for IAMSLIC
members' suggestions to add or change subject terms in both the ASFIS Thesaurus
and the Library of Congress Subject Headings and;
2. Coordinate production of a document to map the ASFIS Thesaurus
terms with LCSH."
Various approaches have been tried to carry out the second charge. At
first, a long table was nearly finished, which simply matched ASFIS terms
with their nearest LCSH equivalent, but it was never completely finished
and while it was being prepared, both LCSH and ASFIS were updated. It is
meant to be a working tool for catalogers, but publication, distribution
and updating were not resolved. With the advent of the World Wide Web,
it now seems that the best approach would be a searchable Web page, listing
all ASFIS terms (some 6000+) and as many LCSH as are necessary to provide
equivalents. We note that approximately half of the ASFIS terms still do
not have adequate LCSH equivalents. We are still searching for a practical
way to build this Web page. Meanwhile, IAMSLIC members worldwide are
eagerly awaiting the finished product.
Reference:
Markham, J.W. (1990). "Library of Congress subject headings and
the ASFIS thesaurus." In: Oceans From a Global Perspective: Marine
Science
Information Transfer (ed. by C.P. Winn), pp. 89-95. Woods Hole, MA
: IAMSLIC. (added 9/13/99)
Email: markham@library.ucsb.edu
Eva Méndez has
a Bachelor of Librarianship and Information Science and was in the first
class of librarianship specialists graduated in Spain. She is working toward
a PH.D. in Information Science from the Carlos III University of Madrid
(Spain). She has been working on various Information Services.
She has been a teacher and researcher at the Carlos III University since
March 1997. She teaches Information Technologies, Thesaurus Construction,
Special Materials Cataloging, and Information Policies in the Information
Science Department of that University. Currently, she is working on her
theses about "Metadata and Information Retrieval" and she is very interested
in all the topics that could be discussed on the "Networked Knowledge Organization
Systems/Services" list.
Email: emendez@bib.uc3m.es
Web page: http://porky.uc3m.es/~mendez/profesional/index.html
Paul Miller
holds the post of Interoperability Focus at the UK Office for Library and
Information Networking (UKOLN). This post is responsible for encouraging
the development and deployment of interoperable services across the range
of memory organizations, such as libraries, archives, and the cultural
heritage community.
Paul is involved in a range of standardization activities, including
the work of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information
(CIMI), the Z39.50 Implementer's Group (ZIG), and the Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative, within which he serves on the Executive Committee. (added 1/27/00)
Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk
UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Interoperability Focus: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/
Jessica Milstead
is Principal of The JELEM Company, a consulting firm specializing in index
and thesaurus design, and in development of machine-aided indexing systems.
She took her masters and doctorate in information science and librarianship
from Columbia University. She taught cataloging, indexing and information
science on library school faculties for a number of years before going
into industry, where she was developer and editor of a number of indexes
to newspapers and scholarly works. In 1986 she founded The JELEM
Company, and has served clients as an independent consultant since then.
She has been active in NISO standards work, has published extensively in
the field, and offers workshops on vocabulary management.
Interest statement: The environment within which vocabularies
for providing access to information are developed and used is undergoing
dramatic change. The old pattern of development by a single organization
for its own use, with application by specially trained experts, is no longer
viable. Creator-applied metadata and machine-aided and automatic indexing
are just two developments which are having a major impact on vocabulary
development -- and of course the use of natural language processing sometimes
replaces
use of any indexing vocabulary at all. I am concerned with all
of these developments; I wish both to remain current with this rapidly
changing area and to contribute to its growth. (revised June 14, 1999).
E-mail: milstead@jelem.com
Web page: www.jelem.com
Gopi Nair is with
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) and is responsible for their
new electronic document management system for processing government reports
and other defense documents.
Email: gnair@dtic.mil
Daniel Nolting,
Visual Resources Curator at the University of Pittsburgh, and am active
in many aspects of establishing digital and data standards to be applied
to retrievable images. I am formerly an LC cataloger, and have also worked
as an indexer for the Getty Information Institute. I am in the beginning
stages of setting up policies and procedures for utilizing the AAT, LCTGM,
ICONCLASS, and other useful controlled vocabulary enhancers. I am also
in charge of 2 servers, both networked and running many images through
the ethernet and the internet. ImageAXS Pro and File Maker Pro are
the two databases that I am working with, and I eventually hope to link
up and/or export to a larger database. I have been in this position
for almost one year (being the first professional librarian) having inherited
one of the largest slide collections in the country (650,000) that has
evolved without any classification standards. I am currently working with
Ph.D. candidates who are performing studies on "content" vs. "concept"-based
image bases.
Slide Library: http://www.pitt.edu/~dnolting/slide.html
Email: dnolting@unixs1.cis.pitt.edu
Marilyn Ostergren
is a Field Director for the NPS (National Park Service) Natural Resource
Bibliography Project. She oversees the development of bibliographic databases
of natural resource management and research documents for Park Service
units. This includes creating and maintaining a thesaurus of relevant terminology.
She has also helped create a web interface for this thesaurus (http://165.83.36.151/nrthes/thes.htm).
"My goal is to coordinate the process of thesaurus development
in the area of natural sciences with others involved with similar projects.
I'm particularly interested in joint efforts to create a system of verifying
terminology with existing authoritative sources and subject specialists
and make the results of that work accessible and available to all interested
parties without copyright restrictions." (added 8/20/98)
Email: Marilyn_Ostergren@nps.gov
Bill Pease is
the architect of the Environmental Defense Fund's online environmental
information service, scorecard.org. This database-backed website
integrates over 200 governmental and scientific datasets covering various
environmental issues (primarily related to the human health impacts of
chemical pollution). It attempts to provide profiles of local environmental
quality which are easily accessible to the general public via maps and
zipcode reports. The system is currently organized using FIPS
geospatial and CAS chemical informatics standards; it also is in the process
of integrating GEMET environmental subject indexing and CRS Legislative
Indexing Vocabulary. Scorecard is expanding rapidly into a national
environmental atlas, and work is currently underway to create a global
environmental atlas using the same web infrastructure. A variety
of software agents are being developed to extend the site's current rudimentary
"enviroguide" by conducting dynamic geospatial and subject indexing of
online environmental resources.
Dr. Pease is a toxicologist who also has an adjunct appointment at UC
Berkeley's School of Public Health, where he teaches chemical risk
assessment and risk management. He is an active participant in
a number of enviro-informatics issues, including the OECD's IUCLID system
for collecting chemical risk assessment data and both state and national
efforts to conduct comparative risk assessments and set environmental priorities.
(added 6/11/99)
Email: billp@edf.org
Homepage: http://scorecard.org
Leah Prescott works
at Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. as Collections Information Technology
Coordinator and is responsible for the coordination and implementation
of data standards across all library and curatorial divisions. She is the
chief authority within the museum for controlled vocabulary and terminology
issues. She is currently chairman of the Controlled Vocabulary Special
Interest Group for the Museum Computer Network and will be leading a conference
session concerning term research for thesaurus construction. For
several years she has collaborated with the Getty Information Institute's
Art and Architecture Thesaurus on term research needed to incorporate maritime
vocabulary into the AAT and more recently the Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
Mystic Seaport is currently involved in an ambitious project to create
an integrated information system which will effectively tie together at
least two major databases, a library system (VOYAGER by Endeavor) and a
collections maintenance system (MULTIMIMSY by Willoughby Associates).
As our goal is to provide effective access for a broad range of users,
we have spent considerable time over the past several years defining and
refining our controlled vocabulary both for internal use and to contribute
to standards within the domain of maritime history. We are currently
struggling with finding effective ways to enable our component systems
to access shared authority files as well as thesauri so that we can offer
high precision/controlled vocabulary information retrieval, as well as
more effective keyword search strategies. This workshop will be highly
relevant to our efforts as well as of great interest to me.
Email: leah@mysticseaport.org
Jacek Purat is
Doctoral Student at the School of Information Management and Systems at
UC Berkeley. He currently works as a research assistant for the SIMS
Search Support for Unfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies Project. His work includes:
organization of environmental terminologies, multilingual environmental
thesauri, and history of environmental classifications. In addition
he is currently developing a Polish language
version of the GEMET Thesaurus. (added 8/10/99)
Email: purat@SIMS.Berkeley.EDU
Homepage: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~purat/
Michael Raugh
is vice president and chief technology officer at Interconnect Technologies
Corporation, Mountain View, CA. He has worked in advanced technology
at Stanford University and HP Labs. Before joining Interconnect,
he served as chief scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer
Science where he developed innovative methods for organizing online information.
He leads Interconnect's products and services for information organization
and analysis.
"It appears to us at Interconnect that the use of metadata standards
in combination with thesauri to help describe and control the vocabulary
used for indexing Internet resources would go a long way towards simplifying
and accurately focusing searches. As the Internet continues to expand,
and the resources become more varied, the need for such focusing tools
will probably increase. To better understand how to create and make
good use of a thesaurus, Interconnect is researching the use of a thesaurus
for indexing computer system vulnerabilities for NIST. In related
earlier work, Interconnect, with the cooperation of Linda Hill, developed
a prototype thesaurus directory. If there is sufficient interest
in that work, we would like to make it available for wider inspection and
use."
Email: raugh@interconnect.com
Web: http://www.interconnect.com
Candy Schwartz
is on the Faculty at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science
at Simmons College, in Boston, Massachusetts. She teaches in the areas
of cataloguing and classificiation, indexing, database management, Web
site design, and digital libraries. Candy has a BA in Linguistics and an
MLS, both from McGill University in Montreal, and a PhD in Information
Transfer (yes, that's what they call it) from Syracuse University - her
dissertation topic was post-retrieval clustering (1986). Candy's publications
relevant to NKOS interests include a chapter on subject access in the Annual
Review of Information Science and Technology (many years ago), a recent
article in JASIS on search engines, an upcoming article in the Journal
of Academic Librarianship on digital libraries, and a just-submitted (January
5) manuscript for a book called "Sorting Out The Web", which is about the
application of "traditional" library organizing tools to collections of
networked resources. Candy has a lifelong interest
in classificiation and indexing, is excited by current interactions
between intellectual and machine-driven organizing methods, and sees NKOS
as a community of like-minded people.
Email: candy.schwartz@simmons.edu
Homepage: http://www.simmons.edu/~schwartz/
Ali Asghar Shiri
received his BS and MS in library and information science from Tehran University
and currently is a PhD student in the Department of Information science,
University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He has worked for seven years in
Jahad Scientific Information Services (JSIS), an Iranian nationwide governmental
information service. He has been involved with database and Internet based
information service provision to the researchers in agricultural as well
as science and technology fields. He is very interested in the role and
application of thesauri in new information environments, mainly the Internet,
and their impact on retrieval performance. He is planning to do his PhD
research in this area. (added 2/2/00)
Email: shiri@dis.strath.ac.uk
Dagobert Soergel
has been working in the area of thesauri both practically and theoretically
for over 30 years. He is the author of the still standard text- and handbook
Indexing
Languages and Thesauri. Construction and Maintenance (Wiley 1974) and
of Organizing Information (Academic Press 1985), which received
the American Society of Information Science Best Book Award, and numerous
papers and presentation on the theory and practice of thesaurus construction.
He has taught courses in thesaurus development at several universities
in the U.S. and Germany and he offers a tutorial on Thesauri for knowledge
based assistance in searching digital libraries, which will be offered
again at the European Digital Library Conference in Crete in September
1998. He has developed a number of thesauri. From 1989 to the present,
he has guided the development of the Alcohol and Other Drug Thesaurus.
He also chairs NIAAA's Thesaurus Advisory committee. He has developed TermMaster,
a thesaurus management software package that can handle an integrated database
of multiple thesauri and that is used in the development and maintenance
of the AOD Thesaurus. He has proposed SemWeb, an open, multifunctional,
multilingual, system for integrated access to knowledge about concepts
and terminology (ISKO proceedings 1996). In 1997, Dr. Soergel received
the highest award of the American Society for Information Science, the
Award of Merit.
Email: ds52@umail.umd.edu
Mark Spasser is
currently a research scientist at the Center for Botanical Informatics
(CBI) at the Missouri Botanical Garden. He has a background in the organization
of knowledge with a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from University
of Illinois. Given that much work in botany presupposes diverse taxonomic
viewpoints that structure existing information about plants in different
ways, CBI is developing computer-based tools to help represent differing
taxonomic viewpoints to provide orienting taxonomic feedback to users navigating
floristic digital libraries. Moreover, CBI is exploring collaborative
research arrangements with various institutions, such as the Center for
Tele-Information in Denmark whose research involves studying the construction
and use of "natural" classification schemes in order to develop multimedia
technologies that provide novel means of creating classification systems
that evolve through highly distributed processes. (added 10/13/98)
Email: mspasser@cbi.mobot.org
Linda Hill Spencer
Dr. Spencer is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Project Manager
for the development of the U.S. English portion of the General European
Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) System. As a representative
on the GEMET Expert Work Group and on the Work Group of the Asian and Pacific
Economic Cooperation' s Virtual Center, she is involved in the development
of the GEMET system beyond its current European context into a truly international
environmental terminological system. On behalf of U.S. EPA, Dr. Spencer
also chairs the Ontology Work Group for the Environmental Data Exchange
Network (EDEN). EDEN is a collaborative endeavor with the Department
of Defense, Department of Energy and European Environmental Agency to pilot
new technology that will enable users to query across heterogeneous databases.
From 1992-1996, Dr. Spencer was the Director of the United Nations Environment
Programme's Environmental Information Exchange Network (INFOTERRA).
At UNEP she supervised the development of a multilingual environmental
thesaurus which served as the backbone for the GEMET system. Prior
to her work at UNEP, Dr. Spencer supervised environmental information exchange
activities at U.S. EPA.
"I would like to understand how to bring together a multilingual thesaurus
and the newest and best in technology to retrieve information in a way
that is targeted, reliable and efficient. How can search engines
employ specialized thesauri? Can/should thesauri be deconstructed into
topics functions? How can a thesaurus assist in the better organization
of metadata inventories/registries? How can a thesaurus assist in
the construction of ontology agents employed in data base integration?"
Email: Spencer.Linda@epamail.epa.gov
Thornton Staples
is the Director of Digital Library Research and Development at Alderman
Library of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is currently
in the process of assembling a digital library management system that consolidates
the collections created in the library's digital centers since 1992 and
positions the library for future developments. The system that is currently
under construction is using an object-oriented repository that should be
able to include higher-level data structures, such as thesauri and ontologies,
as objects integrated into the system.
Prior to this, he was the Chief of the Office of Information Technology
at the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution.
In that position he was extensively involved in metadata issues, participating
in the Dublin Core workshop series and the CIMI Dublin core testbed project.
Previously, he was the Project Director at the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. In that capacity he was
involved in many large-scale humanities research projects, including the
Rossetti Archive, the Valley of the Shadow project, the Pompeii Forum project
and the Blake Archive. In both of these last two positions he was active
in the Museum Educational Site Licensing project, first from the university
side, then for the museum. (added 8/6/99)
Email: tls@virginia.edu
Lori J. Starr
serves as Head of the Thesaurus Section of the Indexing Branch at the National
Agricultural Library. The Thesaurus Section works cooperatively with
CAB International to develop and maintain the CAB Thesaurus, which
is the controlled vocabulary for indexing records contained in NAL's bibliographic
database, AGRICOLA (Agriculture OnLine Access). The Thesaurus Section maintains
an internal thesaurus file for NAL staff. Additionally, Lori serves
as a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations for maintenance of the English version of AGROVOC, which
is the controlled vocabulary of the multilingual AGRIS database.
NAL, in partnership with FAO and CAB International, initiated a Unified
Agricultural Thesaurus Project in 1989 which resulted in (1) a classified
version of AGROVOC and (2) an overall UAT Classification that encompasses
the subject areas of both AGROVOC and CAB Thesaurus.
Lori's next challenge is to provide a classification structure for AgNIC
(Agriculture Network Information Center). NAL is anticipating the
release of AGRICOLA on the Internet.
"With the introduction of NAL's database, AGRICOLA, on the Internet,
this raises questions of how NAL can most effectively aid retrieval in
this large (3 million+ records) database to a variety of users. I
believe that thesauri are generally undervalued and they are usually seen
as monsters that slow database production, are not used by searchers, and
eat up staff resources to maintain. My personal goal is to bring
the positive aspects of thesauri "out of the closet" and demonstrate how
the hierarchical structure and relationships contained in the thesaurus
can positively enhance retrieval in an Internet environment. Other
databases on the Internet are already doing this. How can a network
of thesauri further enable retrieval? What structure needs to be
in place at NAL for data exchange? Listening to what others envision
for the future and how I can apply this to the AGRICOLA database are my
goals at the workshop."
Email: lstarr@nal.usda.gov
Matt Theobald
is President & Chief Scientist at Interactive Nomenclature, LLC. Current
professional roles include Information Specialist at the Indiana
Higher Education Telecommunication System, Internet Strategy Advisor
at i-N.com, and a partner in City360.com. Matt holds a Masters in Science
in Library & Information Science ('96) from Indiana University and
a B.A. in History ('94) from Hanover College. He has had an active role
in public/private sector Internet development.
Previous positions:
Application Developer | Indiana Digital County Network (INDICO) | Indiana
Interactive (I@I) | National Information Consortium (EGOV)
see http://www.indico.net
Webmaster | Access Indiana Information Network | I@I | EGOV
see http://www.state.in.us
Site Architect & Webmaster | IOWAccess Project 1 | Iowa Citizens
Information Network, presented the Iowa State Governor's Award
for Outstanding Dedication and Service in Spring 1999. The project
itself received the Armand Hammer Information Technology Award
from Vice President Gore in Fall 1999. | EGOV
see http://www.state.ia.us
(added 11/11/99)
Email: theobald@ihets.org
URLs: http://www.i-N.com, http://www.ihets.org,
http://www.City360.com
Judith Thomas
is the Associate Director for Digital Media at Clemons Library at the University
of Virginia. She is currently developing an on-line archive of digital
images, owned by or licensed to the University of Virginia, available for
use to our academic community. This archive uses metadata based on the
Visual Resources Association Core and implements a variety of classifications
tools (especially the thesauri developed by the Getty Information Institute
(http://www.gii.getty.edu/vocabulary/).
This digital collection will be integrated with the electronic resources
developed in the other electronic centers at the University Library - including
SGML (TEI)-tagged texts at the Electronic Text Center and EAD-based materials
at the Special Collections Digital Center - as the main focus of our Digital
Library initiative. We are researching standards for metadata, descriptive
terminology, and thesauri for this integrated, networked system.
Email: jet3h@virginia.edu
Digital Image Center: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/dic
University of Virginia Library Electronic Centers: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/ecenters.html
Roger Thompson
is a Systems Analyst in OCLC’s Office of Research. He received his Ph.D.
in Computer and Information Science from Umass/Amherst in 1989. Current
work stresses the design and implementation of information delivery systems
with a focus on integrating traditional knowledge organization systems
with advanced information retrieval systems. (added 8/17/99)
Email: thompson@oclc.org
Erica Treesh
is an editor at the American Theological Library Association working on
the ATLA Religion Database and associated print products. She has
fifteen years experience in database indexing/abstracting. ATLA has
recently received a grant of $216,000 from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.
This grant will enable ATLA to develop its own Internet node with full
transactional capabilities. The grant will also support the purchase
of CuadraSTAR, an indexing system with authority and thesaurus capabilities
that will support full MARC indexing from local and remote sites.
Our intent is to mount the ATLA Religion Database and associated authority
files on our website for access by our indexers and database subscribers,
as well as by partner projects (such as the Catholic Periodical and Literature
Index which is currently using the ATLA Religion Indexes: Thesaurus) and
by others writing religion thesauri (such as the ETHERELI project of the
International Council of Theological Library Associations). My goal
in relation to this workshop is educational: to gain a fuller understanding
of what I as an indexer/editor need to consider as we plan for the new
software implementation and website presence. What specifications
are other thesauri employing? What emerging standards should we be
aware of? What technical considerations might govern future thesaurus
structure and format?
Email: etreesh@atla.com
ATLA: http://atla.library.vanderbilt.edu/atla/home.html
Douglas Tudhope
is with the Computer Studies Department at the University of Glamorgan,
Wales, UK and is the Editor of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia.
Six years ago the University was commissioned to build a hypermedia museum
exhibit on local history from the photographic archives of the Pontypridd
Historical and Cultural Centre. This inspired a University research assistantship
in collaboration with PHCC that resulted in Carl Taylor's PhD work on semantic
modelling and navigation in museum hypermedia systems. As part of this
work, a number of research prototypes were built investigating a hypermedia
architecture with a semantic index space separate from the document space
(Beynon-Davies et al 1994, Taylor et al 1994). A variety of conventional
hypermedia navigation techniques were implemented with this architecture
(Tudhope et al 1994). Primary access routes were time, space and as subject
index the Social History and Industrial Classification (SHIC). Rather than
using fixed embedded links, navigation was based on queries over an underlying
semantic index space, with results post-processed for expression in a particular
navigation tool. Queries to the database can be simple or complex. Conventional
hypermedia navigation techniques, including both local and global browsers,
guided tours, and Boolean queries can be implemented by relatively simple
underlying queries. More complex queries return partial matches using measures
of semantic closeness between terms in a semantic index space; advanced
navigation options included query expansion when a query fails to return
results and navigation via similarity to current item (Cunliffe, Taylor,
Tudhope 1997). Most existing commercial museum access systems using
thesauri rely on interactive approaches or limited query expansion techniques.
A classification system, or thesaurus, embodies a semantic network of relationships
between terms, the three main thesaurus relationships being hierarchical,
associative and equivalence. Thus there is some inherent notion of distance
between terms, their 'semantic closeness'. Distance measurements can be
exploited to provide more advanced navigation tools. A distance measurement
between terms (and between sets of terms) offers the opportunity for imprecise
information requests. Semantic term expansion lies at the heart of
the measures of closeness between terms in automated term expansion and
similarity measures in retrieval tools.
The intention in future research is to build on the principles underlying
the semantic index space, extending the semantic model to a full set of
thesaurus relationships, and investigate the potential of intelligent navigation
tools in a major museum which can facilitate evaluation. We are currently
implementing underlying models in both relational and semantic database
systems. One issue under consideration is how these tools can be utilised
in a networked environment and how the thesaurus structure and query engine
parameters should be visualised to the user. Our research focus and collaborations
in the museum domain, where there has been recent work on user query analysis
and modelling, may enrich discussion in the workshop.
Relevant publications
Beynon-Davies P., Tudhope D., Taylor C., Jones C. 1994. A Semantic
Database Approach to Knowledge-based Hypermedia Systems, Information and
Software Technology, 36(6), 323-329.
Cunliffe D., Taylor C., Tudhope D. 1997. Query-based navigation in semantically
indexed hypermedia. Proceedings 8th ACM Conference on Hypertext (Hypertext'97),
Southampton. April, pp 87-95.
Jones C., Taylor C., Tudhope D., Beynon-Davies P. 1996. Conceptual, Spatial
and Temporal Referencing of Multimedia objects. Advances in GIS Research
II, Proceedings 7th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, (eds.
Kraak and Molenaar) , August, Delf, pp 2.13-2.26.
Taylor C., Tudhope D., & Beynon-Davies P. 1994. Representation and
Manipulation of Conceptual, Temporal and Geographical Knowledge in a Museum
Hypermedia System. Proc. ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology
(ECHT'94), Edinburgh, 239-244.
Tudhope D., Beynon-Davies P., Taylor C., Jones C. 1994. Virtual Architecture
based on a Binary Relational Model: A Museum Hypermedia Application, Hypermedia,
6(3), 174-192.
Tudhope D., Taylor C., Beynon-Davies P. 1995. Taxonomic Distance: Classification
and Navigation. Proceedings 3rd International Conference on Hypermedia
and Interactivity in Museums: Multimedia Computing and Museums (ed. D.
Bearman), San Diego, October, pp 322-334.
Jones C., Beynon-Davies P., Taylor C., Tudhope D. 1995. GIS, hypermedia,
and historical information access. Proceedings 7th International Conference
of the Museum Documentation Association, Edinburgh, Nov, pp 109-113.
Tudhope D., Taylor C. 1996. Flexible Access to Multimedia Museum Collections.
Proceedings Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts (EVA'96), London, July,
pp 7.1- 7.11
Tudhope D., Taylor C. 1996. A unified similarity coefficient for navigating
through multi-dimensional information. Proc. 59th Conference of the American
Society for Information Science (ASIS'96), 67-70.
Tudhope D., Taylor C. 1997. Navigation via Similarity: automatic
linking based on semantic closeness. Information Processing and Management,
33(2), 233-242.
Email: DSTUDHOPE@GLAMORGAN.AC.UK
Homepage: http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/dstudhope
Diane Vizine-Goetz is
a Research Scientist in the OCLC Office of Research. She is team
leader of the knowledge organization research (KOR) team which has had
a long-standing involvement in information organization using classification
systems and controlled vocabularies. When Forest Press, publisher of the
Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), became a division of OCLC in 1988,
the KOR team prototyped classifier-assistance tools based on the electronic
version of the DDC. Electronic Dewey and Dewey for Windows are OCLC products
that resulted from that research.
The KOR team is currently investigating techniques for automatically
associating subject-access systems like the DDC and the Library of Congress
Subject Headings for the purpose of expanding the vocabulary of the DDC.
Mapping between schemes is accomplished through the application of corpus-based
natural language processing techniques and statistical information retrieval
techniques. Terminology mapped in this way often represents current and
popular topics not represented by existing captions or Dewey index terms
but within the scope of Dewey knowledge structure. These new associations
(from free text and controlled indexing systems) are being used to enhance
the database components of automated and semi-automated systems that automatically
assign subjects to electronic documents. This work and research to transform
the captions of the DDC into end-user language are aimed at improving category-based
access to electronic documents and making traditional subject access systems
more hospitable for use in a distributed information environment.
Recent publications:
From Book Classification to Knowledge Organization: Improving Internet
Resource Description and Discovery. ASIS Bulletin. October/November
1997. Volume 24, No. 1. Accessible at: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-97/vizine.htm
Evaluating Dewey Concepts as a Knowledge Base for Automatic Subject
Assignment. Electronic version of the paper published in the Digital Libraries
'97: 2nd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries. Accessible
at: http://orc.rsch.oclc.org:6109/eval_dc.html
Library Classification Schemes and Access to Electronic Collections:
Enhancement of the Dewey Decimal Classification with Supplemental Vocabulary.
Published in Advances in classification research Volume 7: proceedings
of the 7th ASIS SIG/CR classification research workshop, 20 October 1996,
Baltimore, Maryland, Paul Solomon, ed., Medford, N. J.: Information Today,
Inc. Accessible at: http://www.oclc.org:5047/~vizine/sig_cr/sigcr_done_dvg.htm
Online Classification: Implications for Classifying and Document[-like
Object] Retrieval. Electronic version of a paper published in Knowledge
organization and change: proceedings of the 4th international ISKO conference,
15-18 July 1996, Washington, D.C., Rebecca Green, ed. Frankfurt/Main: INDEKS
Verlag. Accessible at: http://www.oclc.org:5047/~vizine/isko/dvgisko.htm
E-mail: vizine@oclc.org
Claude Vogel
is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Semio Corporation. Semio
offers a service that creates and maintains browsable, searchable taxonomies
for intranets and Web sites. These taxonomies are based upon concepts automatically
extracted and organized from large collections of documents. He has a background
in Anthropology (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, 1976, Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology,
1992, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris). He is a Professor and the
Director of the Computational Semiotics Laboratory at the University Leonard
de Vinci in Paris, and an Associate Professor of Computational Semiotics
at the University of Montreal. He engages in ongoing research on the subjects
of software engineering, cognitive design, social organizations, and semiotics.
(added 12/8/99)
Semio website: www.semio.com
Email: cvogel@semio.com
Ron Vogel is
an oceanographer with NASA's Global Change Master Directory, an online
directory for scientists to locate data sources in the Earth and environmental
sciences. He has worked on the development of a controlled vocabulary
for Earth science metadata and on interoperability of metadata between
various geospatial data providers.
By restructuring various classification schemes from multiple providers
into a single metadata format (keeping each classification scheme distinct
through the use of a database tag), metadata documents could thus be entered
into a single database and searched. However, users still had to
select one of various classification schemes when conducting a search.
In order to allow seamless searching of all metadata documents, a mapping
between vocabularies could allow documents from the various providers to
be found. While all the classification schemes are environmental,
they do not all cover the exact same environmental domains. In those
instances where one classification scheme cannot be mapped 100% to another
classification scheme, the documents must be retrieved by other means.
Furthermore, in order to move to a distributed search environment where
users may search by one classification and retrieve documents indexed with
another, metadata structures with increased flexibility are necessary.
Is it possible to incorporate multiple classification schemes into single
or multiple metadata formats and still allow seamless document searches?
Global Change Master Directory: http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Email: vogel@gcmd.nasa.gov
Madi Weland is
currently a Project Management Assistant with the Getty Information Institute.
Her primary project for the past year has been the "Digital Experience,"
a room in the J. Paul Getty Museum with fourteen computer workstations
dedicated to helping the museum public access cultural content on the World
Wide Web <http://www.getty.edu/digital>.
Prior to joining Getty in 1997, she spent seven years as Curatorial Assistant
at The Eli Broad Family Foundation, a contemporary art foundation in Santa
Monica <http://www.broadartfdn.org>.
This August, she will take on a new position of Associate with the Getty
Information Institute, working more closely on projects with Standards
and Vocabulary. (added July 14, 1998)
Email: mweland@getty.edu
Richard White
graduated in Botany & Zoology from Bristol, UK, and completed a PhD
in Liverpool, UK, on the local evolution of a colony-forming day-flying
moth, relating population dynamics and colony separation to morphological
differentiation. However, since coming to Southampton in 1976, he
has supported the use of computers in biodiversity research and teaching,
specialising in software development for biological applications, including
the design, organisation and implementation of biodiversity databases,
pages and databases on the World-wide Web, and algorithms and software
to make outline shape and pattern measurements from images of biological
objects.
His work in biodiversity databases is currently focussed on ways to
link them together on the Web. He built the Web version of the ILDIS database
on the plant family Leguminosae (www.ildis.org),
which is now a prototype component of the Species 2000 project to create
a virtual catalogue of (eventually) all the world's species of plants and
animals (www.sp2000.org).
It will allow users to follow links to other sources of information
about species. The choice of the technology for Species 2000 and
problems arising from certain ambiguities in the use of species names are
being addressed in the SPICE (biodiversity.soton.ac.uk/spice/)
and LITCHI (litchi.biol.soton.ac.uk)
projects, respectively. (added 8/2/99)
Email: rjwhite@soton.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~rjwhite/
Marcia Lei Zeng is
an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Science
at Kent State University, with major research interests in knowledge organization
and representation, thesaurus and other indexing languages, information
storage and retrieval systems, indexing systems and software, and multilingual
information processing. Recently she has been working on three projects
that are related to this workshop's theme: (1) the design and development
of a visual terminology database for medicinal herbs which is one component
of the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Digital Library, a joint
project of her and three other P.I.s in Columbia University. In this
project she also developed an online-classification scheme which is used
in guided Internet searching for alternative medicine, implemented through
JavaScript; (2) a pilot digital library project for a historical
fashion collection at Kent State University, where specialized thesauri
and metadata have been studied under her supervision; and (3) during the
last two years, she has generated various HTML-based templates for publishing
thesauri and indexes on the WWW.
Her major purposes of participating in this workshop are to share with
others the specific considerations about presenting thesaurus/classification
systems on networked environments and to contribute to the discussions
of an XML definition for a thesaurus or a general scenario for searching
and navigating a networked thesaurus or classification system. In
addition, she wishes to share experiences and explore alternative approaches
to vocabulary control in the networked environment for specific subject
areas which have strong multi-cultural and multi-lingual aspects.
Visual terminology database for medicinal herbs: http://web.slis.kent.edu/~mzeng/MeshNIH/welcome.htm
(please contact her for the password)
Templates for publishing thesauri and indexes of the WWW: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~slis/zeng/template/intro/toc.html
Email: mzeng@kentvm.kent.edu
Paul Zhang is
a research scientist at LEXIS-NEXIS. He is interested in technical aspects
in the IR area, including search, indexing, thesaurus-building. LEXIS-NEXIS,
as a major information provider, is moving towards “drilling” deeper into
the contents of documents. Paul is currently involved in this effort,
focusing on the analysis of text, data mining and information extraction.
(added 8/17/99)
e-mail : paul.zhang@lexis-nexis.com
http://www.lexis-nexic.com