Key publications

This is a small sample of some of the KO-related research that members of CeKOR have been doing in recent years.

 For a full publication lists, see the link to UCL profiles under each researcher in the members section.

Dr Deborah Lee

  1. Lee, D. (2025). The visual, the textual, and the one‐dimensional: An exploration of the visual elements of bibliographic classification schemes. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 76(10), 1411–1427. This article in JASIST explores a novel aspect of looking at classification schemes: thinking about how visual aspects manifest themselves in textual representations of knowledge organisation. This contributes a new strand of research about the nature of knowledge organisation systems.
  2. Lee, D. (2025). Genres, Forms, Types, and Somewhere in Between: Exploring the Category of “Musical Genre” for Organizing Bibliographic Music Collections. Library Trends, 74(1), 193–223. This article in Library Trends presents a model of the classificatory units of musical genre, arguing that there are important and unexplored overlaps with type of music and musical form.  This research combines deep KO research of knowledge organisation systems with the domain analysis of music.
  3. Lee, D. (2023). Organising music’s structures: The classification of musical forms in Western art music. Journal of Information Science. This article in Journal of Library and Information Science which does a deep analysis of the classification of musical form, a feature of music typically overlooked by studies which look at music classification, and does by examining the organisation of contents in music textbooks.  This article shows the power of domain analysis as a knowledge organisation approach, and the methodology of table of contents analysis.

  4. Lee, D. (2021). Form as classification: an exploration of musical form as a knowledge organization system. Proceedings from North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, 8, 1–14. This conference paper also looks at the classification of musical form, but posits that we could think of musical form as a knowledge organisation system by comparing musical form to various criteria of knowledge organisation systems.  This radical idea extends our thinking about what is a knowledge organisation system.

     

Malithi Alahapperuma

  1. Alahapperuma, M., & Vlachidis, A. (2025). The Semantics of Emotion: Exploring Synonym Rings to Evaluate Emotive Contexts in Translations Across Sinhala and English. In M. Sfakakis, E. Garoufallou, M. Damigos, A. Salaba, & C. Papatheodorou (Eds.), Metadata and Semantic Research (Vol. 2331, pp. 349–362). Springer Nature Switzerland. This paper examines the possibility of using synonym rings to contextualise emotive contexts in literary text translation across Sinhala and English. The paper contributes to knowledge organisation by exploring whether abstract concepts can be better understood with the use of formal knowledge organisation systems.

Prof. Antonis Bikakis

  1. Golub, K., Liu, Y.-H., Vlachidis, A., Antoniou, A., Bikakis, A., & Terras, M. (2021). Semantic metadata enrichment and data augmentation of small museum collections following the FAIR principles. In K. Golub & Y.-H. Liu (Eds.), Information and Knowledge Organisation in Digital Humanities: Global Perspectives (1st ed., pp. 106–129). Routledge. This book chapter demonstrates through a case study how ontologies and semantic technologies can enrich and augment metadata of small museum collections to make them FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). It contributes a semantics-based methodology aimed at enhancing the structuring, interoperability, and reuse of cultural heritage data, which are core challenges in Knowledge Organisation.
  2. Vassiliades, A., Patkos, T., Efthymiou, V., Bikakis, A., Bassiliades, N., & Plexousakis, D. (2024). Extraction of object-action and object-state associations from Knowledge Graphs. Journal of Web Semantics, 81, 100816.  This article compares and proposes methods for extracting object–action and object–state relationships from large knowledge graphs (e.g., DBpedia, ConceptNet) using semantic and structural techniques. It advances Knowledge Organisation by investigating how semantic relationships between entities are identified and structured within knowledge graphs.
  3. Vlachidis, A., Bikakis, A., Kyriaki-Manessi, D., Triantafyllou, I., & Antoniou, A. (2017). The CrossCult Knowledge Base: A Co-inhabitant of Cultural Heritage Ontology and Vocabulary Classification. In M. Kirikova, K. Nørvåg, G. A. Papadopoulos, J. Gamper, R. Wrembel, J. Darmont, & S. Rizzi (Eds.), New Trends in Databases and Information Systems (Vol. 767, pp. 353–362). Springer International Publishing. A paper presenting the design and development of the CrossCult Knowledge Base, which interlinks diverse cultural heritage data across sources and contexts. It contributes to Knowledge Organisation by demonstrating how ontologies, vocabularies, and classification schemes can be integrated to achieve semantic interoperability and unified organisation of heterogeneous cultural heritage data.

  4. Yang, X., & Bikakis, A. (2024). Using CIDOC-CRM to Model Hexi Regional Poetry. In E. Garoufallou & F. Sartori (Eds.), Metadata and Semantic Research (Vol. 2048, pp. 193–204). Springer Nature Switzerland. This paper demonstrates the use of the CIDOC-CRM ontology to model and represent knowledge about regional poetry. Its main contribution is a semantically rich model (ontology and knowledge graph) of the content and metadata of Hexi regional poetry, which serves as a tool for the research of the history and culture of this area.

     

Prof. Vanda Broughton

1.  Broughton, V. (2024). Ranganathan’s religion and its influence on his library science. Annals of Library and Information Studies, 71(1), 19-37. This paper in the Annals of Library and Information Studies was an invited paper for a special issue on Ranganathan. This paper considers what his religious practice might have been throughout his life, and how that interacted with his intellectual work. His faith seems to have been modified during his lifetime, and the conflict between spiritual experience and intellectual activity finally resolved. “Ranganathan’s religion and its influence on his library science.” Annals of Library and Information Studies, 71(1):19-37

2.  Broughton, V. (2023). Facet Analysis: The Evolution of an Idea. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 61(5–6), 411–438. This paper in Cataloging and classification quarterly examines the disparity in the use and understanding of concepts such as “facet,” “facet analysis,” and “faceted classification.” The paper traces the history of these ideas and how they have been employed in different contexts. What may be termed the classical school of faceted classification is given some prominence, through the ideas of Ranganathan and the Classification Research Group, but other interpretations are also explored. Attention is paid not only to the idea of what facet analysis is, and what purpose it serves, but also the language utilized to describe and explain it. (It was the most read paper of the 2023 volume)

3.  Broughton, V. (2019). The Respective Roles of Intellectual Creativity and Automation in Representing Diversity: Human and Machine Generated Bias. Knowledge Organization, 46(8), 596–606. This paper in Knowledge Organization traces the development of the discussion around ethical issues in artificial intelligence and considers the way in which humans have affected the knowledge bases used in machine learning. The phenomenon of bias or discrimination in machine ethics is seen as inherited from humans, either through the use of biased data or through the semantics inherent in intellectually-built tools sourced by intelligent agents. The kind of biases observed in AI are compared with those identified in the field of knowledge organization, using religious adherents as an example of a community potentially marginalized by bias. A practical demonstration is given of apparent religious prejudice inherited from source material in a large database deployed widely in computational linguistics and automatic indexing. Methods to address the problem of bias are discussed, including the modelling of the moral process on neuroscientific understanding of brain function. 

4. Broughton, V., & Lomas, E. (2020). Philosophical Foundations for the Organization of Religious Knowledge: Irreconcilable Diversity or a Unity of Purpose? Knowledge Organization, 47(5), 372–392. This paper in Knowledge Organization examines the way in which religion is managed in the major library classification schemes and in archival practice and how and why bias and misrepresentation occur. Broad definitions of what is meant by diversity and religious pluralism and why it is a cause for concern precede a discussion of the standard model of interreligious attitudes (exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism) with particular reference to the philosophy of John Hick. This model is used as a lens through which to evaluate knowledge organization systems (KOSs) for evidence of comparable theoretical positions and to suggest a possible typology of religious KOSs. Archival and library practice are considered, and, despite their very different approaches, found to have some similarities in the way in which traditional societal structures have affected bias and misrepresentation of religious beliefs. There is, nevertheless, evidence of a general move towards a more pluralistic attitude to different faiths.

5.  Broughton, V., & Slavic, A. (2007). Building a faceted classification for the humanities: principles and procedures. Journal of Documentation. (Originally in Journal of Documentation) Facet analysis provides an established rigorous methodology for the conceptual organization of a subject field, and the structuring of an associated classification or controlled vocabulary. This paper explains how that methodology was applied to the humanities in the FATKS project, where the objective was to explore the potential of facet analytical theory for creating a controlled vocabulary for the humanities, and to establish the requirements of a faceted classification appropriate to an online environment. A detailed faceted vocabulary was developed for two areas of the humanities within a broader facet framework for the whole of knowledge. Research issues included how to create a data model which made the faceted structure explicit and machine‐readable and provided for its further development and use.

 

Dr Jin Gao

  1. Wang, X., Zeng, M. L., Gao, J., & Zhao, K. (Eds.) (2026). AI and Smart Data for Cultural Heritage: Global Achievements and China’s Innovations. Routledge [In-production]
  2. Wang, X., Zeng, M. L., Gao, J., & Zhao, K. (Eds.) (2024). Intelligent Computing for Cultural Heritage: Global Achievements and China’s Innovations. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781032707211
  3. Gao, J., Crymble, A., Mahony, S., Gray, S., & Warwick, C. (2024). Empowering global engagement: The development of digital humanities research and pedagogy at UCL. In X. Wang, M. L. Zeng, J. Gao, & K. Zhao (Eds.), Intelligent Computing for Cultural Heritage: Global Achievements and China’s Innovations (pp. 71-98). London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781032707211-6
  4. Gao, J., Zhang, Y., Liu, J., & Pedro Sousa, J. (2026). A Digital Humanities Approach to Chinese Export Watercolours: A Case Study on the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

 

Dr Kalliopi Kontiza

  1. Padfield, J., Kontiza, K., Bikakis, A., & Vlachidis, A. (2019). Semantic Representation and Location Provenance of Cultural Heritage Information: the National Gallery Collection in London. Heritage, 2(1), 648–665. This paper describes a working example of semantically modelling cultural heritage information and data from the National Gallery collection in London. The paper discusses the process of semantically representing and enriching the available cultural heritage data and reveals the challenges of semantically expressing interrelations and groupings among the physical items, the venue and the available digital resources.
  2. Vlachidis, A., Bikakis, A., Kyriaki-Manessi, D., Kontiza, K., Padfield, J., & Triantafyllou, I. (2017). Semantic Representation and Enrichment of Cultural Heritage Information for Fostering Reinterpretation and Reflection on the European History. In Ioannides, M. (Ed.), Digital Cultural Heritage: Final Conference of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage. Springer. The paper presents a working example of connecting and mapping cultural heritage information and data from cultural heritage institutions and venues through the open technological platform of the CrossCult project. The process of semantically representing and enriching the available cultural heritage data is discussed, and the challenges of semantically expressing interrelations and groupings among physical items, venues, digital resources, and ideas are revealed. The paper also highlights the challenges in the creation of a knowledge base resource which aggregates a set of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS): a carefully selected subset of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, a set of application ontologies and an optimised classification scheme based on domain vocabularies.

 

Jiayu Li

  1. Li, J., & Bikakis, A. (2023). Towards a Semantics-Based Recommendation System for Cultural Heritage Collections. Applied Sciences, 13(15), 8907. This paper demonstrates how a semantics-based recommendation system can enhance the discovery and accessibility of cultural heritage collections. Through a case study on art collection, it explores the use of semantic metadata and graph databases to facilitate the access and discovery of cultural heritage resources. The study contributes to Knowledge Organisation by illustrating how semantic relations can be utilized to structure complex cultural archives, ultimately improving the navigation and accessibility of specialized domain knowledge.

 

Dr Andreas Vlachidis

  1.  Humbel, M., Vlachidis, A., Zhang, J., Schmidt, F., Prishchepova, V., Nyhan, J., & Flinn, A. (2026). Implementing FAIR principles for interoperable oral history collections through mappings to Dublin Core. In Communications in Computer and Information Science. Thessaloniki, Greece: Springer Verlag.
  2. Vlachidis, A., MacDonald, I., Valeonti, F., Nyhan, J., & Sloan, K. (2025). A Data Atlas Method for Analysing and Visualising Dispersed Cultural Heritage Collections. magazén, 6(2). doi:10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2025/02/002
  3. Sadek, J., Vlachidis, A., Pickering, V., Humbel, M., Metilli, D., Carine, M., & Nyhan, J. (2024). Leveraging OCR and HTR cloud services towards data mobilisation of historical plant names. International Journal of Digital Humanities. doi:10.1007/s42803-024-00091-4
  4. Vlachidis, A., & Tudhope, D. (2022). A Method for Archaeological and Dendrochronological Concept Annotation using Domain Knowledge in Information Extraction. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 15(3), 192-203. doi:10.1504/IJMSO.2021.123042