Monday 19 December 2011

Season's Greetings from the UDCC


Best wishes for Christmas to everyone from the UDC team. We look forward to sharing a prosperous and productive 2012!

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Classification & Ontology - another successful International UDC Seminar


Classification & Ontology: Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge

The International UDC Seminar 2011 took place on 19-20 September in The Hague and was attended by 141 delegates from 30 countries from Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Australia.

The keynote address by Patrick Hayes kick-started a two-day programme consisting of 21 talks and two poster presentations.

Following the opening talk, speakers from different domains expanded on their particular view of what ontologies and knowledge structures may mean in their specialised areas of work and what aspects of ontological analysis or formal ontology modelling are relevant in the world of knowledge classifications. A number of talks stressed the urgency for knowledge classification schemes to be published as linked data and the limitations of the existing web ontology standards, SKOS specifically, were revisited a number of times. Presentations about particular schemes illustrated that classifications may indeed require more thought with regards to modelling.

* Slides and audio recordings can be accessed from the conference programme page.

* Proceedings, published by Ergon, can be purchased online on the conference website.

Classification & Ontology was the third biennial conference in a series of UDC Seminars organized by the UDC Consortium and hosted by Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands).

Monday 15 August 2011

Classification & Ontology conference proceedings


Proceedings of the International UDC Seminar 2011 are published by Ergon Verlag.

Classification and ontology: formal approaches and access to knowledge: proceedings of the International UDC Seminar, 19-20 September 2011, The Hague, The Netherlands. Edited by Aida Slavic and Edgardo Civallero. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2011. 328 pages. ISBN: 978-3-89913-865-8.

The book will be distributed in delegate packs at the conference in September and will be available for purchase following the event.

CLASSIFICATION AND ONTOLOGY:
Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge
19-20 September, The Hague

Venue: Koninklijke Bibliotheek
Fee: 200 EUR (secure your place at this event)

Ontology-like representations of classifications are recognized as potentially important facilitators in creating a web of linked data.

The conference keynote speaker is Professor
Patrick Hayes, one of the key players in the Semantic Web initiative and the development of RDF, OWL and SPARQL. His talk entitled "On being the same" will remind us of some oddities and internal inconsistencies in data found on the Web, as the Semantic web starts to take shape with the rise of linked data.

Following the keynote address we will hear a selection of speakers from the domains of web technology, ontology, knowledge organization and bibliographic classification, including Dan Brickley, Guus Schreiber, Thomas Baker, Dagobert Soergel, Roberto Poli, Ingetraut Dahlberg, Barbara Kwasnik, Rebecca Green, Michael Panzer, Marcia Zeng, Daniel Kless, Joan Mitchell, Richard Smiraglia, Vanda Broughton, Devika Madalli, Claudio Gnoli and more...

The International UDC Seminar 2011 is followed by DC-2011 - 11th International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications "Metadata Harmonization: Bridging Languages and Description", 21-23 September.

Monday 8 August 2011

UDC Update Meeting @ IFLA 2011

77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly
Colleagues working with the UDC and attending 77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly in Puerto Rico are invited to attend the annual

UDC UPDATE MEETING
Thursday, 18 August
13:15-14:15
Room 102A


Members of the UDC Editorial team and UDC Consortium (UDCC) will provide an update on current developments, new translations, editions and services. The meeting will provide an opportunity to exchange information and discuss issues in relation to the UDC.

New: UDC Newsletter (IFLA edition), August 2011, now also available in Spanish.

Important: UDCC has presented us with 5 vouchers for 70 EUR discount on the regular conference fee for the International UDC Seminar "Classification& Ontology: Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge" 19-20 September, The Hague. Vouchers will be given away at the meeting on a first-come, first-served basis.

Thursday 14 April 2011

Programme announcement - Classification & Ontology Conference


Classification and Ontology UDC International Seminar 2011
International UDC Seminar 2011
The Hague, 19-20 September

We are pleased to announce that the "Classification and Ontology" programme is available on the conference website.

The conference focuses on knowledge classification systems and their role in the development of the Semantic Web, bringing together stakeholders from the web ontology and knowledge organization fields.

The conference opens with a keynote address by Prof. Patrick Hayes, who participated in the W3C Working Groups responsible for the RDF, OWL and SPARQL standards and has been a key player in the Semantic Web initiative.

The programme that follows has an outstanding selection of speakers from the domains of web technology, ontology, knowledge organization and bibliographic classification: Dan Brickley, Guus Schreiber, Thomas Baker, Dagobert Soergel, Roberto Poli, Ingetraut Dahlberg, Barbara Kwasnik, Rebecca Green, etc.

The two-day conference will take place in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. The programme includes 21 talks organized into seven sessions:

See the full programme, accompanied by abstracts and speakers biographies.

We look forward to seeing you in September.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Multilingual UDC Summary update - 40 languages to date

UDC Summary (udcS) translations continue with great intensity, using our online, web-based tool and multilingual spreadsheets for offline work. We now have 40 languages online in over 10 different scripts: Armenian, Basque, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

We expect the top classes in Irish, Punjabi and Vietnamese shortly and we are reaching out to other colleagues interested in collaboration. There are over 100 volunteers, librarians, library school lecturers and researchers currently working on translations in their national language. Database statistics showing the translation progress can be viewed at the translation statistics page. Acknowledgments to contributors are currently noted in a translation tracking table.

There seems to be great interest in using the online schedules even in this present form. Average access to the website in March was over 22,000 hits per day.

Because of the intensity of the translation activity, and in order not to lose momentum, we devoted all of 2010 to encouraging, acquiring, uploading and supporting translations, improving the online translation interface and export tools. You can view a more detailed report in the Extensions & Correction, 31(2009). We are now in the process of designing our web content management system (Drupal) to support management and access to downloading exports, mappings and various useful content we will attach to udcS. Our plan for providing data dumps for download, various kinds of exports, and for publishing udcS as linked data is scheduled for 2011. We have created an alphabetical index of around 10,000 terms in English and we are now looking at creating an interface to this. Both mappings to other systems and natural language access will be our focus in the following months.

Report on the ongoing translation in Italian was provided by Chiara Zara at the ISKO Italy meeting in Venice (1 April 2011) "Il progetto di traduzione multilingue online della CDU".