IFLA General Conference 2014

If you happen to be in Lyon, please join us for our regular UDC Update session at the 2014 IFLA General Conference and Assembly.

Members of the UDC Editorial team will give a brief presentation on the current developments in the UDC, ongoing translation projects, forthcoming publications and events.

Monday, 18 August
12.45-13.45
Room St. Clair 3b

The UDC Update Newsletter is available here.

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).

Announcement: Classification & Ontology: International UDC Seminar 2011

Classification & Ontology:
Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge
The Hague, 19-20 September 2011

Following the success of the 2009 conference we are very pleased to announce the next in the series of biennial conferences devoted to the advancement of bibliographic classification research, organized by the UDC Consortium and hosted by Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

The difference between bibliographic knowledge classification schemes and ontologies resides in their particular purpose and levels of formality. However, they are both based on observation and reasoning and share some structural principles and elements: categories, concepts, properties, class relationships, roles.

The objective of this conference is to promote collaboration and exchange of expertise between different fields dealing with knowledge classifications: bibliographic, web and AI. We hope to learn more about methods in ontology modelling and whether these may be used to improve and formalise data models of bibliographic classifications and enhance their value in information discovery.

Papers are now invited covering the following topics:

1. Modelling and representation of knowledge classifications
2. Standards and solutions for innovative and high-quality classification data processing
3. Applications and implementations of classification structures as ontologies
4. Theoretical considerations of the role of knowledge classifications

The proposals should be of interest to academic and research communities dealing with conceptual modelling, information systems design, knowledge organization, knowledge engineering, semantic interoperability & information integration, and natural-language processing.

To read more about the invited topics and to submit contribution go to the conference website.

Paper proposal submission deadline: 30 January 2011.

Last call for registration: Classification at a Crossroads

International UDC Seminar
Classification at a Crossroad: Multiple Directions to Usability
The Hague, 29-30 October 2009.

The final Programme with abstracts and speakers' biographies containing a selection of 22 talks is now available.

This conference will cover a variety of topics: classification of web resources, automatic classification, relationships between thesaurus and classification, terminology services, web ontology standards, new approaches in using or presenting classification and classification use in library networks.

The programme highlights are talks by our keynote speakers Dagobert Soergel "Illuminating the Chaos: Using Classification to Harness the Web" and Dan Brickley "Open Web Standards and Classification: Foundations for a Hybrid Approach".

A recent addition to the programme is a presentation by Stella Dextre Clarke "Providing for interoperability between thesauri and classification schemes in ISO 25964" on the new ISO standard for structured vocabularies and its approach to classification.

Ergon Verlag will exhibit and sell books from its series Advances in Knowledge Organization at a special 50% discount. All delegates are given 20% discount to Facet Publishing Titles. Both publishers contributed a number of books for a lottery draw and delegates will have a chance to win a book.

The registration for the conference will close on 20th October. To register, with an option to pay online go to http://www.udcc.org/seminar2009/php/registration.php.

Registration open

CLASSIFICATION AT A CROSSROADS
Multiple Directions to Usability
International UDC Seminar 2009
29-30 October 2009, The Hague

VENUE: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
URL: http://www.udcc.org/seminar2009/index.htm
FEE: €110 (student discount: €90)

The conference programme includes a selection of over twenty papers representing classification research in 14 countries. Speakers will address the potential of classification, in supporting information organization, management and resource discovery in the networked environment and will explore solutions for better subject access control and vocabulary sharing services.

Two eminent keynote speakers will address the conference: Prof. Dagobert Soergel, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland (USA) and Dan Brickley, an advocate and developer of W3C Semantic Web technologies (UK).

The conference is the second in a series of International UDC Seminars organized by the UDC Consortium and hosted by The National Library of The Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek). The UDCC is a self-funded, non-commercial organization, based in The Hague, established to maintain and distribute the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and supports its use and development.

To take advantage of the early bird discount, you can register and pay online at the conference website.

CFP: International UDC Seminar 2009 "Classification at a Crossroads", The Hague, 29-30 October 2009

Following the success of the first International Seminar on UDC, the second in a series of biennial conferences entitled Classification at a Crossroads: Multiple Directions to Usability will take place on 29-30 October 2009 in the UDC headquarters at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague.

The 2009 Seminar aims at exploring how new developments in information standards and technology influence and affect applications and services using classification, Universal Decimal Classification in particular, and its relationships to other systems.

The Seminar programme will highlight many ways in which the use classification can be improved. Attention will be paid to the applications of classification in supporting multilingual access, user-friendly representations of classification in resource discovery and semantic searching expansion and classification application across distributed systems.

Papers are now invited on the following topics:

Classification and semantic technologies, e.g. experiences with vocabulary standards for expressing and porting classification data into the Semantic Web, vocabulary registries, terminology services
Classification in supporting information integration, e.g. classification use in alignment of vocabularies, classification as a common subject language in co-operative systems, experiences in multi-database systems, classification mapping to other subject languages, classification enhancement with social tagging
Verbal and multilingual access to classification, e.g. textual searching and display, management of subject-alphabetical indexes, extraction of thesauri from classification schemes
Classification authority control and library systems, e.g. issues with MARC formats, authority file development, maintenance and sharing of data
Visual representations/interface to classification, e.g. issues in classification browsing and faceted representation in classification tools and information systems
Experiences with classification outside the traditional library environment, e.g. use in different types of digital repositories (eprints, VLE), resource discovery on the Web, alerting services, specialised bibliographic services and databases (images, sound), organization of physical objects (museums, archives)

To read more about conference theme and to submit your abstract visit the event's website.

Press release - UDC Seminar, The Hague

A two day International Seminar on the UDC, organized by UDC Consortium, was held at the UDC Headquarters in the The Hague 4-5 June 2007. The event was entitled "Information Access for the Global community" and its aim was to explore the latest developments and applications of the Universal Decimal Classification. The Seminar brought together UDC publishers, editors of the scheme and UDC users and offered an opportunity for information exchange and discussion of future developments.

There were around seventy participants from over thirty countries including librarians, subject specialists, editors of national editions of the scheme, university lecturers, researchers and LIS students. The conference programme included eleven invited talks on the topics of user experiences and applications, innovative approaches in UDC use and UDC education and training (see programme). Papers will be published in the forthcoming Extensions and Corrections to the UDC, in November 2007 and will be also made available online from the UDC website.

The UDC Consortium chairman Alan Hopkinson and the UDC Editor in Chief Maria Inês Cordeiro invited greater input from users and announced a newly formed international editorial team and new editorial system that will support the collaborative input of an international team of UDC revision experts. The UDC MRF file will be moved to a new database with extended functionality, including improved and more diversified UDC exports in 2007. The UDC Consortium announced that this successful seminar would be the first in the series of similar events it plans to organize in the future.