The UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organisation

ISKO UK Meetups

ISKO UK Meetups are dedicated to discussing broad range of topics related to knowledge organization and building bridges between academics and practitioners. Whether in-person or online, ISKO UK Meetups provide an informal and friendly atmosphere and encourage interaction and networking.

Throughout 2023, ISKO UK Meetups are being organized as online events through the Meetup.com Knowledge Organization London Group. Join the group to receive updates and register to attend.

Past event videos are available on YouTube as ISKO UK Meetup 2022 Playlist and ISKO UK Meetup 2023 Playlist.

Upcoming Events

We are still working on the ISKO UK Meetup program for 2024.

 Tuesday, 8 October 2024

What's New in Skosmos 3

by Osma Suominen

Skosmos is an open-source, web-based SKOS browser and publishing tool designed to access controlled vocabularies for indexing, information retrieval and vocabulary development.

With a background in Computer Science, user interface design, Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies, Osma Suominen works on opening up bibliographic metadata at the National Library of Finland.


Past Events in 2023

Wednesday, 8 November 2023

Information Governance

by Noeleen Schenk

Information Governance is a crucial aspect of managing information in organisations, and in this meetup, we'll examine what it is, why organisations are adopting it, some common overarching processes and how it relates to knowledge organisation. We'll also delve into how organisations partition the domain, including whether security, privacy, and quality are included and if there are any regulations that drive this partitioning. Additionally, we'll discuss case studies to understand what good information governance looks like. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from Noeleen Schenk and understand the impact of Information Governance on organisations!

Video and event details

Wednesday, 11 October 2023

How Can a Knowledge Audit Contribute to Knowledge Management Planning

by Patrick Lambe and Janine Weightman

A knowledge audit provides an "at a glance" view of an organization's needs and opportunities. Its purpose is to improve an organization's effectiveness through a better understanding of the dynamics and levers of knowledge production, access, and use. However, there is a lot of inconsistency in how knowledge audits are conducted, which sometimes undermines the credibility and usefulness of the exercise.

Patrick Lambe will introduce a systematic approach to knowledge auditing and will talk about the inspiration behind his newly published book "Principles of Knowledge Auditing: Foundations for Knowledge Management Implementation", and Janine Weightman will share her practical experience conducting knowledge audits through a case study.

Video and event details

Wednesday, 6 September 2023

coli-conc: Mapping Knowledge Organization Systems

by Uma Balakrishnan

coli-conc is an infrastructure that provides easy access to KOS and mappings in a uniform data format on a single platform. It also facilitates management and exchange of concordances between library knowledge organization systems. The heart of the coli-conc infrastructure is the mapping tool Cocoda which assists in the creation and processing of intellectual mappings amongst various types of KOS. The presentation will include a live demonstration of the tool, the different sources of mapping suggestions as well as the current and possible future use cases of the tool and mappings in different scenarios.

Video and event details

Wednesday, 10 May 2023

One Information Management System for Compliance, Governance and Findability

by Stuart Eve and Darren Wray

In this talk, Stuart Eve and Darren Wray from SimSage will discuss meeting competing priorities with a single information management system.

Event details

 Wednesday, 12 April 2023

The Opportunities and Challenges in Leveraging Sustainable Finance Taxonomies

by James Phare and Daniel Burke-Ward

Suddenly in recent years, the world of sustainable finance has become transfixed with Taxonomies, which classify financial securities and activities as 'green' (sometimes even light green or dark green). With the EU Green Taxonomy leading the way, over 30 green taxonomies now exist - mainly developed by international financial regulators & standards bodies. Yet, whilst finance for a long time has worked with a variety of taxonomies, such as industrial sector classification schemes, for the vast majority of the sustainable finance community, these taxonomies remain an untapped resource, poorly understood and underutilized.

In this talk, James & Dan will share their practical experiences of working with the various sustainable finance taxonomies, the direction the space is headed in as well as touching on some of the use cases Neural Alpha are delivering utilizing taxonomies within Knowledge Graph powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other applications.

Video and event details

Wednesday, 8 March 2023

Vocabs Editor and Taxonomy Publishing Ecosystem

by Peter Andorfer and Klaus Illmayer

In the first Meetup of 2023, Peter Andorfer and Klaus Illmayer from Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities will discuss Vocabs Editor and the taxonomy publishing ecosystem based on Skosmos.

Video and event details


Past Events in 2022

Thursday, 24 November 2022

Data Discovery at Wiley

by Niké Brown

In this follow-up to ISKO UK Meetup in October about taxonomy business use cases, Niké Brown focuses on the real-world issues of taxonomy design and implementation.

Video and event details

Monday, 10 October 2022

How Taxonomies Can Solve Complex Business Problems

by Ramona Aubry

Have you ever wondered what pain points a taxonomy can solve? In this session, we’re sharing our experience around the way in which taxonomies deliver value for organizations that struggle with content challenges. Join us to learn why taxonomies are unique in tackling the most advanced business problems when it comes to unstructured content.

 Video and event details

Tuesday, 13 September 2022

How to Build a Knowledge Graph

by Paul Appleby

In this talk we cover the steps in the journey to creating a knowledge graph, from beginning to use taxonomies and ontologies through to finally delivering knowledge graphs at scale through APIs.

The best approach for many organisations is to deliver a knowledge graph incrementally to provide value as soon as possible. The learning curve can be steep and the skills are not always available. We look at how the latest tooling can help with this.

There is also the question of build versus buy (including open source) and we cover some of the pros and cons of both approaches.
The journey is not all about technology though so we also look at some of the points relating to users and patterns of working, collaboration and a few observations that we commonly see.

Video and event details

Tuesday, 12 July 2022

Taxonomies for Confluence

by Eugene Morozov

One in the series of short talks showcasing developments in knowledge organization tooling. Eugene will talk about Taxonomies for Confluence, a Confluence add-on that lets you classify pages and blog posts using SKOS controlled vocabularies and integrate Confluence content into knowledge graphs.

Video and event details

Tuesday, 14 June 2022

Why Graphs? The Limits of Hierarchical Thinking

by Bob Kasenchak

Why would a taxonomist interrogate the limitations of hierarchical thinking and information organization? Graphs offer more specific and flexible structures to model relationships between objects. This basic change of frame reflects more accurately the way humans understand information, provides flexible and extensible modelling options, and usurps existing (tree-based, or arboreal) power and information structures in favour of a decentralized, democratized information environment with no beginning and no end.

Video, slides and event details

Tuesday, 10 May 2022

The Evolution of UX Strategy

by Jaime Levy

Have you ever wondered aloud, what the hell is UX Strategy? Well Jaime Levy, the author of the O’Reilly Media best-selling book UX Strategy is coming with a long ranty answer. User experience (UX) strategy lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy. This talk delves into the evolution of the term over the last 15 years and how it has taken on new meaning. Jaime will also provide a high-level overview of the product/UX strategy techniques that make up her methodology. Please come with good cheer and questions.

Event details

Tuesday, 12 April 2022

Keywording Creative Content

by Clemency Wright

This presentation explores the key methodologies and strategies employed when Keywording creative content.

We’ll see how Keywording relates to content classification and content retrieval. We’ll look at illustrated examples and learn about real-life case studies, and how organisation employ creative Keywording practices.

There is a focus on conceptual Keywording and the impact this has for today’s brands and visual communications.

This presentation introduces the practical skills required to harness conceptual keywords, optimise access to assets, and target more users with relevant content.

The key principles of Relevance, Accuracy and Consistency will be discussed alongside visual examples, to achieve the key learning outcomes.

Video, slides and event details

Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Basic Steps in Creation of Structured Vocabulary

by Leonard Will

When creating a structured vocabulary, in addition to the technical and intellectual considerations about defining concepts and their relationships, there are management aspects that have to be resolved. Why do you think that a structured vocabulary is needed? What resources will it give access to? Who will use it, at the input and output stages? What kind of structure will be appropriate? What software will it use? Who will maintain it? These matters are dealt with in clause 13 of the international standard ISO 25964-1:2011, which this talk will summarise to encourage participants to answer these questions for themselves.

Video, slides and event details

Tuesday, 22 February 2022

E-commerce Search is Broken - How to Fix it With Open Source Software

by Charlie Hull

The simple truth is that if you can't find it, you won't buy it - but in that case why do so many e-commerce websites fail at the basics of search, with irrelevant or even zero results for the simplest of queries? Charlie will show examples of search failures and introduce Chorus, an open source reference implementation for powerful and relevant search that can be swiftly tuned to fix common e-commerce search issues.

Event details

Tuesday, 25 January 2022 The Evolving Role of Metadata

by David Haynes

David Haynes will talk about ways in which metadata’s role in the digital economy is changing. In his book "Metadata for information management and Retrieval" he talks about the six purposes of metadata. Some areas such as information retrieval are due a re-think and other areas such as information governance are becoming more critical.

Event details

Past Events in 2021

Tuesday, 23 November 2021 ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup: Introduction to Wikibase

by Mohammed Sadat Abdulai, Georgina Burnett, Phil Stacey and Eugene Morozov

Event details

Tuesday, 19 October 2021

Coping with Complexity: Building a Knowledge Graph for UK Parliament

by Anya Somerville and Michael Smethurst

Event details

Tuesday, 14 September 2021

Copyright in a Knowledge Organization Workplace

by Stephen Garfield

Event details

Tuesday, 06 July 2021

On the Pre-history of Information Technology

by Stephen Robertson

Event details

Tuesday, 15 June 2021 Semantic Tagging and Text Classification for Archives and Content Systems

by Chris Newell.

Many archives and content production systems suffer from a lack of comprehensive content metadata. This presentation describes work to overcome this using automated text tagging and classification tools which can be applied to text documents, video subtitles or speech-to-text transcripts.

Event details

Tuesday, 01 June 2021

ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup: VocBench Workshops: Part 3: VocBench Vocabulary Versioning and Data Catalogue

by Armando Stellato, Phil Stacey and Eugene Morozov

In this last interactive workshop in the VocBench series, we'll talk about managing versions of your vocabulary. We'll provide an instance for all participants to get the first-hand experience - you'll be able to use a preloaded vocabulary to play along or bring your own.

Event details

Tuesday, 25 May 2021

MS Teams – The Case for Information Architecture and Governance

Presentation by Metataxis.

This presentation seeks to address the issues and challenges organisations and information managers are facing with the introduction of MS teams, providing practical advice on how to address them, focusing on the developing a robust information architecture and governance .

Slides and event details

Tuesday, 04 May 2021

ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup: VocBench Workshops: Part 2: VocBench Data Import with Sheet2RDF

by Armando Stellato, Phil Stacey and Eugene Morozov

In this second interactive workshop, we'll talk about importing existing vocabularies into VocBench. We'll use both standard format and Sheet2RDF feature. You'll be able to play along using the provided data. If you manage your vocabulary in a spreadsheet, you can bring it along, and we'll see what we can do!

Event details

Tuesday, 20 Apr 2021 Beyond the Hero's Journey

by Paul Rissen

Drawing upon the work of screenwriting experts, critics and academics, as well as seven years of experience with narrative online, this talk will demystify the process of crafting a narrative, showing how information architecture and structured thinking can help us make sense of the stories we tell ourselves every day.

Event details

Tuesday, 06 April 2021

ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup: VocBench Workshops: Part 1: Introducing VocBench

by Armando Stellato, Phil Stacey and Eugene Morozov

"Introducing VocBench" is the first workshops in which speakers will present VocBench and explain the basics. A VocBench instance will be created to provide participants with a first-hand experience. Participants will be able to use preloaded vocabulary or bring their own. An open Q&A session is arranged to give participants an opportunity to ask questions and share their experience with VocBench.

Event details

Tuesday, 23 March 2021

Going Virtual with Taxonomy Boot Camp London

by Helen Lippell and Kat Allen from Taxonomy Boot Camp London

This was a very different talk from what might have been if we'd been asked in 2019. The call for papers for TBCL 2020 was sent out early last year, just as worrying news about the novel coronavirus were emerging.

Boot Camp has been running since 2016 (and its US sister event for over a decade). The last year has been unlike any other. We explained how we have adapted to changing circumstances to create an online version of our friendly and intensive conference.

Event details

Tuesday, 16 February 2021

Searching Fast and Slow: Exploring Alternative Approaches to Search for Knowledge Workers


Tony Russell-Rose is Senior Lecturer in Computer Science. He is also Director of UXLabs, a research and design consultancy specialising in complex search and information access applications.

In this Meetup, Dr Tony Russell-Rose considers knowledge workers such as information professionals, legal researchers and librarians and their requirements to create and execute search strategies that are comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible.

Slides and event details

Tuesday, 19  January 2021

Email and MS Teams From an Information Architecture Perspective

In this Meetup, James Lappin  has explored what strategies towards email will best enable information professionals to make a positive contribution to how messages are managed, protected and exploited as a knowledge resource. 

 James Lappin has spent over twenty years working in the field of archives and records management.  He has provided consultancy advice for UK Parliament as well as the Hinkley Point C nuclear power. James is currently working for the European Institutions. He is also carrying out a doctoral research project into archival policy towards email in conjunction with Loughborough University and the National Archives. James is the author of the Thinking Records blog and presenter of the IRMS podcast series.

Event details

Past Events in 2020

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

Interactive Workshop VocBench: Getting Started, Installation Step 1

VocBench is a web-based open source application to build knowledge organisation systems using SKOS, but it needs a bit of work get it running. In this interactive workshop, Phil Stacey and Eugene Morozov will walk through prerequisites and the local set up of VocBench step-by-step, and develop a simple taxonomy using Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). A Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) provides a standard way to represent knowledge organisation systems such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web.

Event details

Tuesday, 17 November 2020

Myths and Half Truths About Semantic Data Modelling

In this talk, Panos Alexopoulos, Head of Ontology at Textkernel,  described certain myths and half-truths that are found in the semantic modelling world and discussed what typically happens in reality.

Event details

Complete list of past events...

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