CFP: International UDC Seminar 2013, The Hague, 24-25 October

Classification & Visualization: Interfaces to Knowledge

VENUE: The Hague, National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
DATE: 24-25 October 2013
WEBSITE: http://seminar.udcc.org/2013/
CONTACT: seminar2013@udcc.org

Bibliographic or documentary classifications are the oldest 'interfaces' to the world of information and knowledge. They provide a meaningful display of concepts and their relationships in a visual and an understandable way, enabling linear ordering of complex hierarchical structures.

The objective of this conference is to explore cutting edge advances and techniques in the visualization of knowledge across various fields of application and their potential impacts on thinking about developments in the more main stream bibliographic and documentary classifications. 

We invite overviews, illustrations and analysis of approaches to and models of the visualization of knowledge that can help advance the application of documentary and bibliographic classification in information and knowledge discovery. 

We welcome high quality, innovative research contributions from various fields of application including: 

• visualization of knowledge orders (e.g. scientific taxonomies, Wikipedia) 
• visualization of collection content, large datasets
• visualization of knowledge classifications for the purpose of managing the classifications and working with them 
• visualization of knowledge to support interactive searching, users browsing behaviour (IR) and classification as an aid to information navigation

Specific topics may include:

1. Issues and challenges in visualization of conceptual structures and knowledge in general (e.g. development of knowledge over time, shift in knowledge structures (dynamic knowledge), interactions between knowledge structures, socio-cultural issues, technical challenges (incl. animation, simulation)
2. Knowledge visualization models and metaphors: theory, methods, overviews, analysis 
3. Visualization of classification in: information searching and browsing (e.g. search expansion, result display); visualization of knowledge in relation to user information needs
4. Presentation and visualization related to specific types of knowledge classification structure (e.g. faceted and enumerative hierarchies, polyhierarchical and/or aspect classifications etc.) 
5. Classification as an aid in presenting and navigating large datasets, or providing an overview of collection content for resource discovery or management purposes 
6. Visualization as an aid to cross-collection, cross-language, cross-vocabulary knowledge browsing 
7. Relationships between classification data formats and classification visualization 

We will accept two kinds of contributions: conference papers and posters. Authors should submit a paper proposal in the form of an extended abstract (1000-1200 words including references for papers and 500-600 words for posters). The submission form is provided on the conference website. 

Conference proceedings will be published by Ergon Verlag and will be distributed at the conference. 

IMPORTANT DATES:

15 Jan 2013 Paper proposal submission deadline
15 Feb 2013 Notification of acceptance 
15 Apr 2013 Paper submission 

ORGANIZER: Classification & Visualization is the fourth biennial conference in a series of International UDC Seminars organized by the UDC Consortium (UDCC) and hosted by Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The National Library of Netherlands). UDCC is a not-for-profit organization, based in The Hague, established to maintain and distribute the Universal Decimal Classification and to support its use and development. UDC is one of the most widely used knowledge organization systems in the bibliographic domain.

FID & UDC Archive news

On 2 October work started on the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) and UDC archive. The archive is located in the basement of the  National Library of Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek).

About the archive

First FID archive folders

Following the creation of the UDC Consortium in 1992, and the dissolution of the FID in 2000, records from the organization were packed into around 150 large cardboard boxes waiting for a permanent place.

The collection consists of:

• around 250 archive folders from the FID with the organization's documentation and publications since its foundation in 1895 (then known as the International Institute of Bliography) 
• the archive of the UDC
• the records of the FID Central Classification Committee
• UDC revision records since 1920s (around 60 metres of shelf space) 
• UDC editions in world languages since 1905 (around 30 metres of shelf space)

Once the entire collection is categorised we will start with a more detailed analysis of the material, its classification and processing. Cataloguing, classification and digitizing the collection will start in 2013, once we have a full overview of the size and content of the archive. There is no doubt that the part of the archive dealing with FID and its international work on documentation and bibliography will be valuable to many researchers in this field. A carefully maintained record of the UDC development, the early correspondence and discussion of the FID/CCC will certainly be a valuable source for researchers in the field of classification history. 

UDC as linked data

The Multilingual UDC Summary has been available as SKOS (XML/RDF) since November 2011. UDC Summary has over 2,500 UDC subdivisions including common auxiliaries (language, place, form, materials, properties etc.). UDC records in this selection contain notes, examples, references and are available in 48 languages. 

In addition to the static export download, the UDC SKOS export is also available for browsing via an html interface which displays each UDC class as a single page with an option for language selection. Both the linked data browsing interface and a single download are available from the UDC linked data webpage. The mapping between UDC and SKOS classes is also available from the same page.

The complete UDC are planned to be made available for machine-to-machine access on the web following the 2012 UDC update. This is planned to include not only 70,000 valid UDC numbers but also 11,000 cancelled classes - which will enable linking and redirecting of library catalogues containing deprecated notations. 

The UDC Summary is now being updated and expanded with UDC MRF 2011 data to include more records in the place auxiliaries and biology areas.

Development of the Multilingual UDC Online

The first complete UDC online schedules were published by BSI in 2000 for UDC in English (see UDC Online). In the subsequent years a number of other complete schedules appeared online in other languages: Czech, Slovenian and Slovakian and several free applications such as the Swedish and old Italian schedules that are not official UDC publications but are released to alleviate problems due to a lack of UDC schedules in these languages. To help with the teaching and training of UDC in 2009, the UDC Consortium released a free Multilingual UDC Summary, which now contains more than 2,500 subdivisions and is available in almost 50 languages and is published as linked data.

What we are able to do now?
In 2010 UDCC created a much needed database infrastructure to support an alignment and translation management tool for various language editions of the complete UDC. The UDC Consortium currently holds in its main UDC MRF mutlilingual database English, Spanish, Czech, Croatian, German and  Dutch UDC MRF data, and plans are being made for other languages to be imported. The translation of these languages has been progressing for over a year now.
 

The translation database service provided by the UDC Consortium means that UDC editions in preparation are being automatically aligned with every new update of the UDC and publishers have a much needed tool to manage translations online and plan the production of their editions.

The natural extension of such a service is a classification interface for end-users that would enable a straigtforward, quick and cost-efficient way of publishing online the full UDC schedules for all publishers. The UDC Consortium is currently working on developing a Multilingual UDC Online user interface to be released in 2013. The most obvious advantage for publishers is that they would avoid the costs of developing their own online products. In addition this service will  be supported by the translation tool comprising of automatic UDC alignments and translators' support which means that the editions can be made accessible to users simultaneously with the ongoing translation of newely revised areas.

Apart from functionality of UDC table browsing, searching and number-building functions already available in products such as BSI's UDC Online, the Multilingual UDC Online is envisaged to have the following features:
- provide access to cancelled UDC number records and their redirections to valid numbers
- allow adding of comments, local data and proposing search terms, mappings etc.
- have a tool to parse, validate or sort complex UDC strings that librarians would like to check
- allow launching of a UDC search against selected library catalogues or bibliographies
- have dedicated editors provide user support for particular languages

UDC libraries in the world - 2012 study

In January 2012, the UDC editorial team started a study into the number of libraries using UDC as a continuation of the previous 2004-2006 survey (pubished in Journal of Documentation, 64/2, 2008) in which it was reported that the system was used in 125 countries. In subsequent years we have discovered users in countries previously assumed to have no UDC libraries. Also some countries have increased their use of UDC while others show a trend towards moving to other national or international systems. In the 2000 survey countries were presented as belonging to three user bands (see details):

In 2012 we looked into the IFLA World Report 2010 and verified and collected our own data on the total number of libraries by type in countries in which UDC is used. We recorded data for national, academic, public and school libraries and we presented  research/scientific/special libraries as a single library category type.

First statistics for Europe: no less than 144,000 UDC libraries

The first stage of the research looked into countries in which the majority of libraries are using UDC. With some help from the UDC Advisory Board members, we expanded our contacts and checked national statistics and information held by national libraries and library associations. So far we have received and checked statistics where available and the lowest and highest estmates from our contacts where statistical data was not available. Data collected for 28 European countries and 4 countries in Asia show over 144,000 libraries using UDC. The most significant numbers in our statistics come from countries in which UDC is the main classification system used in all or almost all libraries, for example Poland, Portugal, Spain, Hungary and Romania. Spain alone has over 24,000 libraries, Poland over 22,000, Hungary over 9,000, Romania over 11,000, Czechia over 9000, Bulgaria over 4,000 etc. Interestingly the statistics are significant for some countries in which UDC is used only in a certain kind of library. In Russia, for instance, the UDC is used in research (scientific), industrial and academic libraries, but there are over 5,000 libraries of this type. Often UDC libraries in such countries tend to hold large and significant collections both nationally and internationally. It should be noted that the number of libraries as a statistic on its own has to be put into context of the type of libraries and their significance. When UDC is used in, for example, public or school libraries, the number of libraries will be greater but these collections are generally smaller and less significant.

We recorded our statistics in terms of 'no less than' and 'no more than' and it is important to say that the research for Europe is yet to be completed. As more information is received, the previously collected data will be verified and cross-checked. For instance, the figure we have so far does not include UDC libraries in France, Germany, Ireland, the UK and Scandinavian countries, for which we could not find any reliable national data or recent surveys. For all such countries a further study would be required. Based on the figure above for Europe, and initial information from Africa, Asia (especially India) and South America our figures show over 150,000 libraries using UDC worldwide. Several independent regional studies are now in progress which will help provide more reliable figures for specific countries. The best way to establish the number of users is, obviously, via regional surveys that are most typically conducted by national library networks, independent researchers or through library school projects. In countries in which library schools encourage students to undertake useful studies of this type and when these studies are properly supervised and based on a sound and verifiable methodology, it is possible to collect valuable data.

We would like to invite colleagues who have done similar research or have an interest in conducting a survey of this kind to contact editorial@udcc.org. We can provide examples of methodologies applied elsewhere and a number of similar survey reports. Short reports on such surveys are invited for publication in our annual serial the Extension and Corrections to the UDC.

New Extensions & Corrections 33 (2011)

The new issue of Extensions and Corrections to the UDC No. 33 (2011), contains a number of reports and articles and the substantial list of changes introduced to the UDC in 2011. Revised tables in total contain information about 2,281 new UDC classes, 741 cancelled classes with their redirection and changes of text in 964 classes.

Highlights in the revised changes:

•  Botany class 582.4/.9 Gymnosperms - the original proposal was discussed and revised during 2011 and the new class which is now broadly aligned with the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group system - APG III (2009) was introduced in the UDC MRF 2011 this spring. Read more.
• Geological time division "61/62" which complies with the subdivision adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS); simple notation for months of the year replacing combinations used before (Common auxiliaries of time - Table 1g).
• Place subdivision for Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Brazil, Sudan and South Sudan.

The UDC Master Reference File 2011 contains now over 70,000 classes.

All cancelled classes and their redirections are, as usual, published online.
See also Bibliography of UDC editions and UDC-related publications published in this issue.

The following texts from this issue are also published in the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (DLIST) repository and are availale online:

• A Slavic: International UDC Seminar 2011 “Classification and Ontology”: a report
• S Davies: UDC Editorial Workshop, The Hague, 21 September 2011: a report  
• A Buxton:  Duplication of concepts in UDC 
• C Gnoli:  Facets in UDC: a review of current situation
• E Civallero:  UDC Biology Revision Project: Second Stage: Class 58 Botany

The Extensions and Corrections to the UDC web page contains information about this and other issues.

UDC Update @ IFLA

The UDC Update session at the IFLA General Conference, in Helsinki will take place on

Sunday 12 August
12.15-13.45
Room 206


UDC editors will provide a short presentations about work on the UDC content developments and other activities.
See also the  UDC Newsletter 2012 prepared for IFLA

Extensions & Corrections to the UDC 32(2010)

The latest issue of the Extensions and Corrections to the UDC No. 32 (2010) contains a number of articles, bibliography of UDC editions and UDC related publications in 2010, two proposals for UDC changes: corrections and the extensions of Table 1c - =4  Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Congo-Kordofanian, Khoisan languages  and proposal for over 800 new entries under 512.7 Commutative algebra and algebraic geometry).

 

This issue also brings an extensive list of UDC entries revised in 2010 and distributed with the UDC Master Reference File 2010 containing 69,093 UDC classes

All cancelled classes and their redirections are, as usual, published online. 

Colleagues interested in these particular fields may wish  to check articles  on the UDC Biology revision and proposal for the improvement of African languages.

Please note that all articles from EC31 (2009) and EC 32 (2010) are also published in the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (DLIST). The 2009 EC issue also contains proceedings of the Internatonal UDC Seminar 2009 and all articles can now be downloaded from DLIST (apart from those published in the Knowledge Organization journal, vol. 37 2010).

To access the full list of articles see:

• Extensions and Corrections to the UDC No. 31 (2009)
• Extensions and Corrections to the UDC No. 32 (2010)
• UDC bibliography 2010