ISKO UK First National Conference
Content architecture: exploiting and managing diverse resources 23-24 June 2009

The first national conference of ISKO UK was hosted by the Department of Information studies at UCL, with Vanda Broughton as Conference Chair. 150 delegates from 17 countries heard a variety of papers addressing the problems of managing and accessing the complete range of information formats, including images, music, and multimedia. Other presentations covered grid computing and computing in the cloud.

Full programme with abstracts, papers, and powerpoint presentations

Keynote speakers were Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information, and David Crystal of Crystal Semantics


Semantic targeting: past, present and future: David Crystal
This keynote address looked at the evolution of the linguistic approach to content analysis which Crystal has been developing over the past 20 years. It begins with the knowledge management taxonomy used for the Cambridge family of general encyclopedias, and follows its transformation into an Internet taxonomy, with applications in automatic document classification, search engine assistance, e-commerce, online advertising, and Internet security. Recent developments have brought a focus on advertising, a field which has seen ideas develop from simple keyword analysis to contextual advertising and now to semantic targeting. Crystal explores the difference between these notions, and describes current issues in the way semantic targeting is evolving, including ways of handling site sensitivity, sentiment, intention, and cultural localization.






e-Research and new challenges in knowledge structuring: Clifford Lynch

This was a high-level overview of some of the developments in e-research and cyberinfrastructure, with emphasis on some of the opportunities for data curation and data reuse, with considerable emphasis on humanities and social sciences as well as science and engineering. It also looked at developments in "citizen science" and what might be thought of as "citizen humanities" in this context. The talk concluded with consideration of the changing nature of publishing/authoring, particularly in the scholarly sphere, and the implications of the production of structured, reuseable, and interchangeable knowledge as part of the processes of scholarship and scholarly communication.




Conference Proceedings
A selection of papers will be formally published in a forthcoming special edition of Aslib Proceedings
The complete programme, presentations (including MP3 files) and full papers can be accessed from the Conference website