The First NKOS Workshop at ICADL

Following a highly successful series of Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) workshops, the First NKOS Workshop at ICADL was marked as an NKOS workshop held for the first time in conjunction with the International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL), on 9th December 2015 at the Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.


A full-day First NKOS Workshop at ICADL was organized to report and discuss recent studies and projects related to the research and development of knowledge organization systems/services (KOS) as well as to provide an exchange platform for the Asian NKOS community and NKOS communities around the world to share their common research interest and to define future KOS research agenda.  

Presentations from the workshop were focused on the principles of modeling, publishing and applications of (multilingual) KOS - such as classification systems, thesauri, lexical databases, value lists, taxonomies, topic maps, ontologies - as well as on KOS delivering using SKOS, OWL, RDF datasets and SPARQL endpoints.

Particularly interesting was the presentation about “Innovative Use of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) that are Published as Linked Open Data (LOD)“ (Zeng, Clunis and Alexiev), which shared the findings of a research conducted by the authors and brought both developers and potential users together to think how to build on the existing LOD KOS (e.g. AGROVOC Multilingual agricultural Thesaurus) new KOS and maximize their usages in innovative ways as, for example, is practiced in AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology), an RDF-aware system with more than 8.0 million structured bibliographical records interlinked to external sources of information by the use of AGROVOC (with more than 40,000 concepts available in more than 21 languages), which is a part of the LOD cloud.

The innovative uses of LOD KOSs were summarized according to their functionalities, in particular, considering the needs and ongoing commitment of the following user groups:

  1. Vocabulary creators/managers (creation, maintaining, enriching, extending, and translating controlled vocabularies);
  2. LOD data creators (as the source of HTTP URIs/IRIs, used in data-transformation, enables different agents/owners of structured data to convert and publish their (meta)data under the Linked Open Data (LOD) principles, to create machine-understandable data for websites, to edit and publish workflows, website products etc.);
  3. Web site developers (KOS as: web services for resource discovery in the Web of Things; middleware for visualizing concepts and relationships, mashing-up resources, and providing user-friendly knowledge presentation);
  4. Researchers (KOS as knowledge bases of research, for example, for obtaining special graphs or datasets for very complicated questions, and revealing unknown relationships).

Abstracts and presentations from the First NKOS Workshop at ICADL, December 9, 2015.