JDIS Special Issue on Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS)

NKOS⁽¹⁾ is devoted to the discussion of the functional and data model for enabling knowledge organization systems/services (KOS), such as classification systems, thesauri, gazetteers, and ontologies, as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet. These tools help to model the underlying semantic structure of a domain for purposes of information retrieval, knowledge discovery, language engineering, and the Semantic Web. NKOS workshops have been held since 1997 in conjunction with related professional and digital library meetings in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The purpose of the workshops is to bring together KOS researchers and practitioners to share work on projects, good practices and innovations, and to discuss and critique this work. Workshops focus on topics including domain modeling, terminology development, validation, automated indexing, annotation and enrichment, and ethics. This JDIS special issue includes a selection of papers developed from presentations at the NKOS Workshop held at the Korean National Library in Seoul on September 26, 2019 as part of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2019 (DCMI-2019). In the spirit of the NKOS workshops, these papers include research in process, reports on projects, and “thought experiments”.

Jian Qin’s paper (Knowledge Organization and Representation under the AI Lens) on knowledge organization (KO) and knowledge representation (KR) which was the Workshop keynote talk, includes a KO paradigm which provides a good frame for this selection of papers from the Seoul NKOS Workshop. Figure 1 is based on a KO Paradigm presented in Qin’s paper along dimensions than can be visualized as a 2×2 matrix. In this figure we have contextualized the NKOS papers assigning the authors’ names for each paper to a quadrant.

Figure 1

We thank the authors and reviewers of these papers as well as the JDIS editorial staff for their assistance in quickly producing this special issue on NKOS.