Information Representation and Knowledge Organization in Cultural Heritage Institutions in Arabian Gulf: A Comparative Case Study

This paper presents the exploratory study conducted with the goal of developing an understanding of the current state of information representation and knowledge organisation in cultural heritage collections in Arabian Gulf countries and perspectives for future developments. This comparative case study focused on three institutions (an archive, an academic library, and a museum), including early adopters and leaders in digital archiving in the region. The mixed-methods research combined semi-structured interviews with in-depth comparative content analysis of metadata records that represent items in institutions’ collections. Despite the limitations of the small-sample analysis, this exploratory case study makes a substantial contribution to research and practice. It is the first study to evaluate information representation and knowledge organisation practices in cultural heritage collections of Arabian Gulf countries. This study also can inform planning and implementation of the large-scale study of the state and perspectives of information representation and knowledge organisation across digital and physical collections of libraries, museums, and archives in the region. Suggestions for future research are included. Practical implications of the study include empirical support for the need for metadata training, developing and documenting metadata creation guidelines and crosswalks, collection and use of feedback from users and knowledge management professionals to improve information representation and knowledge organisation. Results also provide insights into interoperability potential of metadata for future regional, national and international aggregations of cultural heritage digital collections across the Arabian Gulf region.

How Social Media Facilitates the Knowledge Management Process: A Systematic Review

The aim of this review is to present the social media roles that facilitate knowledge management processes. This paper used a systematic literature review method based on PRISMA guidelines. The literature search was conducted using the following five electronic scientific databases: Web of Knowledge, Science Direct, Emerald, PubMed and Scopus. The search identified 82 selected works and the findings showed that social media facilitates knowledge acquisition by being used as a source of knowledge, facilitating knowledge accessibility and influencing knowledge creation and creating an interactive environment. Social media has created a new dimension of knowledge organisation by evolving knowledge storage, retrieval and classification activities. Social media has developed into a new flexible form of user’s communication by removing knowledge-sharing barriers, and accelerated knowledge sharing, in particular collaborative sharing. Finally, social media facilitates knowledge application activities such as knowledge translation, decision-making, education, problem-solving, team work and research process. The knowledge activities in social media need to be monitored for quality and reliability, and endangerment of ethics, users’ privacy, fake news, false information and negative comments need to be maintained.

Applying VocPrez to operational semantic repositories: the NVS experience

<p>The Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) Vocabulary Server (NVS<sup>1</sup>) has been serving the marine and wider community with controlled vocabularies for over a decade. NVS provides access to standardised lists of terms which are used for data mark-up, facilitating interoperability and discovery in the marine and associated earth science domains. The NVS controlled vocabularies are published as Linked Data on the web using the data model of the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). They can also be accessed as web services (RESTFul, SOAP) or through a sparql endpoint. NVS is an operational semantic repository, which underpins data systems like SeaDataNet, the pan-European infrastructure of marine data management, and is embedded in SeaDataNet-specific tools like MIKADO. Its services are being constantly monitored by the SeaDataNet Argo monitoring system, ensuring a guarantee of reliability and availability. In this presentation we will discuss the pathway of challenges we encountered while enhancing an operational semantic repository like NVS with VocPrez, a read-only web delivery system for Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)-formulated RDF vocabularies. We will also present our approach on implementing CI/CD delivery and the added value of VocPrez to NVS in terms of FAIRness. Finally we will discuss the lessons learnt during the lifecycle of this development. </p><p>VocPrez<sup>2</sup> is an open-source, pure Python, application that reads vocabularies from one or more sources and presents them online (HTTP) in several different ways: as human-readable web pages, using simple HTML templates for different SKOS objects and as machine-readable RDF or other formats, using mapping code. The different information model views supported by VocPrez are defined by profiles, that is, by formal specifications. VocPrez supports both different profiles and different formats (Media Types) for each profile.</p><p>VocPrez enhanced the publication of NVS both for human users and machines. Humans accessing NVS are presented with a new look and feel that is more user friendly, providing filtering of collections, concepts and thesauri, and sorting of results using different options. For machine-to-machine communication, VocPrez presents NVS content in machine-readable formats which Internet clients can request directly using the Content Negotiation by Profile standard<sup>3</sup>. The profiles and formats available are also listed on an “Alternate Profiles” web page which is automatically generated per resource thus allowing for discovery of options. As a result, human or machine end users can access NVS collections, thesauri and concepts according to different information models such as DCAT, NVS’ own vocabulary model or pure SKOS and also in different serializations like JSON-LD , turtle, etc. using content negotiation. </p><p><sup>1</sup>http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/</p><p><sup>2</sup>https://github.com/RDFLib/VocPrez</p><p><sup>3</sup>https://www.w3.org/TR/dx-prof-conneg/</p>

Jamstvo perspektive u transdisciplinarnoj organizaciji znanja

Viewpoint warrant in transdisciplinary knowledge organization: This doctoral thesis report on original research employed to organize knowledge and provide documentational support in the field of bioethics. More particularly, this doctoral thesis confronts the problem of perspectival ambiguity in bioethics by considering the notion of perspectives as points of access to diverse outlooks on particular phenomena. Knowledge organization as a discipline of library and information sciences has a long research and professional tradition. In the last 25 years a growing number of authors researching interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge organization are restating and emphasising the problem of the disciplinary foundations of traditional knowledge organisation systems. These foundations is apparent in the very structures of the most accomplished systems like the Universal Decimal Classification. The critique is focused on the monodimensionality and monoperspectivity of traditional systems, and is characterized by a distinct evocation of the concept of perspectives and advocacy for the development of multi-perspective knowledge organization. According to those authors traditional systems can't respond to the needs of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers. This doctoral thesis deals with viewpoint warrant in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge organization in the context of a specific inter- and transdiscipline of integrative bioethics.

Testing the validity of Wikipedia categories for subject matter labelling of open-domain corpus data

The Wikipedia category system was designed to enable browsing and navigation of Wikipedia. It is also a useful resource for knowledge organisation and document indexing, especially using automatic approaches. However, it has received little attention as a resource for manual indexing. In this article, a hierarchical taxonomy of three-level depth is extracted from the Wikipedia category system. The resulting taxonomy is explored as a lightweight alternative to expert-created knowledge organisation systems (e.g. library classification systems) for the manual labelling of open-domain text corpora. Combining quantitative and qualitative data from a crowd-based text labelling study, the validity of the taxonomy is tested and the results quantified in terms of interrater agreement. While the usefulness of the Wikipedia category system for automatic document indexing is documented in the pertinent literature, our results suggest that at least the taxonomy we derived from it is not a valid instrument for manual subject matter labelling of open-domain text corpora.

CLARIAH: Enabling Interoperability Between Humanities Disciplines with Ontologies

One of the most important goals of digital humanities is to provide researchers with data and tools for new research questions, either by increasing the scale of scholarly studies, linking existing databases, or improving the accessibility of data. Here, the FAIR principles provide a useful framework. Integrating data from diverse humanities domains is not trivial, research questions such as “was economic wealth equally distributed in the 18th century?”, or “what are narratives constructed around disruptive media events?”) and preparation phases (e.g. data collection, knowledge organisation, cleaning) of scholars need to be taken into account. In this chapter, we describe the ontologies and tools developed and integrated in the Dutch national project CLARIAH to address these issues across datasets from three fundamental domains or “pillars” of the humanities (linguistics, social and economic history, and media studies) that have paradigmatic data representations (textual corpora, structured data, and multimedia). We summarise the lessons learnt from using such ontologies and tools in these domains from a generalisation and reusability perspective.