People
Members of the research centre:
- Dr Deborah Lee (Director)
- Malithi Alahapperuma (PhD student)
- Prof. Antonis Bikakis
- Prof. Vanda Broughton
- Dr Jin Gao
- Dr Kalliopi Kontiza
- Jiayu Li (PhD student)
- Sophie Thiele (PhD student)
- Dr Tabitha Tuckett
- Dr Andreas Vlachidis
Dr Deborah Lee, Lecturer in Library and Information studies
Dr Deborah Lee is a Lecturer in Library and Information Studies and is passionate about knowledge organisation. She specialises in researching and teaching knowledge organisation and is currently the programme director of the MA in Library and Information Studies. She was awarded her PhD in Library and Information Science in 2017 from City, University of London, and her thesis is a deep analysis of the classification of Western art music. Her research interests include music classification, theories of knowledge organisation systems, cataloguing ethics, cataloguing education, and arts cataloguing and classification. Topics and approaches within KO have included domain studies of knowledge organisation especially around music, close studies of the classification of musical genres, the reception of classification schemes, and redefining the idea of classification schemes. Deborah’s knowledge organisation research appears in publications including Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Journal of Information Science, Library Trends, Journal of Documentation, Knowledge Organization, Information Research, Journal of Library Metadata, Art Libraries Journal and Proceedings of the Document Academy, among others. Deborah is a member (and formerly interim vice-chair) of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) Scientific and Technical Advisory Council, which oversees the scientific work of the international organisation for KO research.
Malithi Alahapperuma, Doctoral Researcher
Malithi is a doctoral researcher at UCL Information Studies. Her PhD research looks at building information and language technology for under-represented linguistic communities, with a particular focus on the Global South. Malithi has deep interest in knowledge organisation, especially in designing knowledge organisation systems for abstract concepts. In a recent research study, she worked on an ontology of emotion lexicon to explore whether emotion words across languages could be captured in a formal ontology. In addition to knowledge organisation research, Malithi has worked on several other studies in natural language processing, media credibility, and public finance. While working as a researcher in Sri Lanka, Malithi co-led the development of the fact-checking platform, FactCheck, which was a first-of-its-kind initiative to combat political misinformation.
Malithi also has extensive industry experience in conceptualising, building, and maintaining information management systems. She currently works as a Senior Information Developer at Arm Limited, alongside PhD study.
Malithi Alahapperuma’s UCL profile
Prof. Antonis Bikakis, Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Antonis Bikakis is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Information Studies at UCL, where he has held academic appointments since 2011. His research and teaching sit at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Information Science, with a focus on logic and knowledge representation, computational argumentation, and semantic technologies. He has designed and delivered modules on Knowledge Representation and Semantic Technologies, Graph Databases, and Semantic Web Technologies, supporting students in understanding how knowledge can be structured, modelled, and made interoperable. He has attracted over £3.8M in research funding from bodies including AHRC, ESRC, Leverhulme, and Horizon 2020, leading interdisciplinary projects on the development and application of semantics-based methods for knowledge organisation and representation in cultural heritage and digital libraries, including CrossCult and Linked Open Bibliographic Data. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed works in leading journals such as Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Information Science, Journal of Documentation, and Knowledge and Information Systems. He is the founder and co-chair of the Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage workshop series, and has co-edited 10 special issues in web semantics, semantic technologies for cultural heritage, and AI applications.
Anthonis Bikakis’s UCL profile
Prof. Vanda Broughton, Professor Emeritus in Library and Information Studies
Vanda Broughton is Professor Emeritus in Library and Information Studies. She has taught classification and knowledge organization for many years and is the author of three books in the field, Essential Classification, Essential Thesaurus Construction and Essential Library of Congress Subject Headings, as well as many articles and published conference papers. She was winner of the McAlister Medal and the CILIP Alan Jeffreys Award for services to the field.
She is a member of ISKO and has served on the ISKO Scientific & Technical Advisory Council, and ISKO Executive Board, and was Editor-in-Chief of its journal, Knowledge Organization. She was a founding member and Chair of ISKO UK, 2007-2011, and has also served on the IFLA Standing Committee on Classification and Indexing, and BSI Committee IDT/3.
A member of the Classification Research Group from the 1970s, her research interests are in faceted classification, and its theory and applications. She is Editor of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification Second Edition, and author of its fourteen published volumes, and has also contributed to the revision of the Universal Decimal Classification, notably that of the Religion class. Her interest in knowledge organization in religion has led to some recent work on bias in that subject. She has an interest in the history and philosophy of KO and has authored several recent papers on the life and work of Ranganathan. She is currently occupied with compiling a book on knowledge architects throughout the ages.
Dr Jin Gao, Lecturer in Digital Archives
Jin Gao is a Lecturer in Digital Archives at the UCL Department of Information Studies, and a Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. I am also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, working on various collaborative research projects. My research interests lie primarily in the digital cultural heritage, museum provenance studies, history of Digital Humanities, social network analysis, and non-Western cataloguing standards. My published studies use social network analysis to explore new insights of the global communities of Digital Humanities and their histories. Also, I am currently editing a biannual book series titled Digital Humanities and Intelligent Computing, with its first book published in 2024 - Intelligent Computing for Cultural Heritage: Global Achievements and China’s Innovations. This book series explores the history and the current expansion of digital humanities research paradigms in China and globally.
Dr Kalliopi Kontiza, Lecturer in Computing and Information Systems
Dr Kalliopi Kontiza is a Lecturer of Computing and Information Systems in the Department of Information Studies at UCL and has a keen interest in Digital Cultural Heritage. She specialises in teaching technical modules across two undergraduate programs (IMB and BSc Information, Data and Society). She was awarded her PhD in Information Science in 2023 from UCL on the topic of Cognition-Based Evaluation of Visualisation Frameworks for Exploring Structured Cultural Heritage Data. Her research interests include how tangible and intangible cultural heritage data can be structured, modelled, and made interoperable. Kalliopi worked as a full-time researcher at the National Gallery of London (CrossCult Research Fellow) with the main task of developing the semantic definition of the National Gallery’s information collection. She is a member of the Hellenic Digital Humanities Research Network responsible to produce a list of Greek terms used in Digital Humanities in the form of a Thesaurus. She is a member of the Ionian Islands Museum Network working on the systematic documentation and classification of an oral embroidery technique, applying international standards such as CIDOC CRM and its extension CRM‑ICH, highlighting the importance of controlled vocabularies, semantic interoperability, and active participation from the local community.
Kalliopi Kontiza’s UCL profile
Jiayu Li, PhD candidate
Jiayu Li is a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Studies, UCL, with research interests in cultural heritage data infrastructure, linked data, and semantic technologies for Digital Humanities. Her PhD research focuses on the contextualization of museum objects through semantic technologies. By integrating critical perspectives from Museum Studies and Material Culture Studies into ontology design, and building linked datasets through semantic enrichment, she aims to move beyond static metadata toward critical, dynamic, contextualized, and knowledge-rich representations of cultural heritage. Prior to her doctoral studies, Jiayu obtained an MSc in Digital Humanities from UCL and has gained extensive experience as a research assistant in interdisciplinary DH projects, including Chinese Commercial Advertisement Archive project, the Sloane Lab project, and “Transforming UCL Special Collections Utilising Wikidata” project.
Sophie Thiele, MPhil/PhD student
Sophie Thiele is an MPhil/PhD student at the Department of Information Studies at UCL. Her research interests are in library classification schemes and their development, classification of performance, especially music and dance, and ethics in classification. Her PhD project is funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council)/LAHP (London Arts and Humanities Partnership) and focusses on marginalisation in classification in and of folk music and dance. It is a Collaborative Doctoral Award and Sophie is working with the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Previous to starting her postgraduate research, she received an MA in Library and Information Services Management from the University of Sheffield. She was awarded an Information School Prize from Sheffield University for the best overall performance. She gained wide-ranging practical experience through working as a library assistant in cataloguing, acquisitions, and inter-library loans at the University of Bath.
Dr Andreas Vlachidis, Associate Professor of Information Science
Dr. Andreas Vlachidis is Associate Professor of Information Science and Deputy Head of School of the UCL, Department of Information Studies. He is Principal Investigator of the project “Mixed-methods digital oral history - MeDoraH” which unfolds semantic web technologies and historical-interpretative analysis to better understand narratives of formation, disruption and change in the history of computing in the humanities. He was a Co-Investigator and Technical Lead of the Sloane Lab, leading the project’s aims on data unification, aggregation, and knowledge base development. He is also convenor of the Alan Turing Research Interest Group – Humanities and Data Science and also led as Principal Investigator the project “Text Analytics for inclusive AI education platforms” that focuses on development of inclusive educational AI applications that promote literacy development and effective writing skills in the humanities and special needs education. He is a visiting Professor for the University of South Wales (USW) collaborating closely with the Hypermedia Research Unit and a regular grant reviewer of Welsh Language Technology and Digital Media Grant for the Welsh Government and many other international research institutions. He has long-term experience contributing to European and UK research projects and has also worked as a project manager and consortium member of the regional research projects CEWN and Re-DrAW in connection with the Digital Research and Development Fund for the Arts in Wales. He holds a PhD in Semantic Indexing of Archaeological Grey Literature, he is a certified text analyst, a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a member of the British Computing Society (BCS). His research on the semantic indexing of cultural heritage resources has received several awards including the Outstanding Paper award from the Emerald Literati Network.