Knowledge Organization (KO) is not just a fascinating research domain to attract our foremost thinkers; it also presents practical challenges to each of us as individuals, sorting out the files on our desktops physical and virtual, searching for inspiration via the Internet, or participating in the fora of social media. But there’s a paradox: while KO practices permeate society, the name “Knowledge Organization” is known only to a few. Invisible boundaries separate KO researchers from the practitioners who could benefit from their findings, and also come between distinct fields of application such as records management, web design, librarianship, information retrieval, etc.This conference aims to explore such boundaries, challenge them and advance our thinking into new territory.

Background 

ISKO is a not-for-profit scientific/professional association with the objective of promoting research and communication in the domain of knowledge organization, within the broad field of information science and related disciplines. The emphasis in our UK Chapter is to build bridges between the research and practitioner communities, in pursuit of which we attract lively and steadily growing audiences to our afternoon meetings. You can see past and future events athttp://www.iskouk.org/events.htm, most with MP3 recordings. The proceedings of our first and second biennial conferences are available in electronic media athttp://www.iskouk.org/conf2009/proceedings.htm andhttp://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/programme.htm respectively.

Conference theme and topics

On the general theme of “pushing the boundaries”, some boundaries that deserve challenge include:

• between research and practice: how to achieve better synergy?
• between one type of KOS and another, e.g. between thesauri and terminologies
• between knowledge management professionals and IT professionals
• between one scientific discipline and another (with new knowledge taking shape at the boundary)
• between the resources on the Web and those behind our firewalls

In confronting any of the above, or indeed a boundary of your own choice, a contribution on any KO topic is welcome, especially if it helps us move forward. Topics currently of interest include:

• Linked open data initiatives
• Metadata management
• Ontologies applied to knowledge engineering
• Searching in a networked environment
• Evolution of social media
• Transmedia narrative
• Semantic modelling
• Vocabulary crosswalks and registries
• Organizing and integrating images