Keynote Address

IAN RUTHVEN

Becoming Different: Information Behaviours During Times of Personal Change

In this presentation I shall discuss our information behaviour during times of personal change. Using a new theory of information behaviour, I shall discuss how we provide, seek, assess, share, use, deny, avoid, and create information - during times of personal change and explain the role of these behaviours in reconstructing ourselves following a life event. This presentation will demonstrate how useful and appropriate information services can facilitate our progress during times of change and why poorly designed information services can act as barriers to successful change. I shall also discuss some of the factors that lead to information sources being seen as trustworthy and credible and why the information we see as trustworthy may change over time.

[will be available shortly]

Understanding and Navigating Biases in Information Behaviour to Facilitate (better) Online Choices

Every day, individuals make numerous decisions online, ranging from selecting their meals, entertainment, or purchases to managing their finances or responding to healthcare scenarios. These decisions may be made instinctively or after careful deliberation, and can occasionally necessitate the balancing of multiple personal objectives. In this talk, I will discuss how the process of decision-making for various types of choices share similar underlying mechanisms. Drawing on my own research on search and recommendation systems, I will illustrate that these different types of choices are vulnerable to diverse biases, which can vary across situations and users. The central idea of the talk is that understanding the biases involved and their effects can aid in designing information systems that avoid or leverage these biases to encourage user behaviours that align with their objectives.

Knowledge Engineering in the Language Model Era

In this talk, I contend that the emergence of large language models (LLMs) (e.g. GPT3, T5) as both a source of knowledge and an an effective tool for extracting knowledge provides new opportunities for knowledge engineering. First, by helping to address the cost knowledge acquisition, LLMs let us focus on other aspects of knowledge engineering - understanding the user, ensuring that the knowledge production lifecycle is reliable, dealing with curation. Second, the accessibility of LLMs means that more people could benefit from knowledge engineering practices. This raises the question of how to disseminate those practices. Here, I take the example of prompt engineering.

Improving Search Quality by Enhancing Access to Metadata

Has something been lost in the move towards federated searching and relevance ranking in academic library search interfaces? The richness of metadata and other KOSs such as classification schemes and controlled vocabularies is often not featured in LMS procurement. The ISKO STAC has set up a working group to develop a set of guidelines for academic libraries that are planning to procure a library management system. The purpose of the guidelines is to enable users to benefit from the intellectual effort that has been invested in assigning metadata to electronic resources. This paper reports on progress of the working group in its review of the literature and the plans for consultations with stakeholders.

‘Seeking Serendipity’ through Knowledge Organisation: Creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for Surprising, Meaningful Discoveries through Browsing

In the field of Human Information Interaction, research on search has often overshadowed that of browsing. This is despite the importance of browsing for supporting people when they don’t necessarily know what they’re looking for and its potential for facilitating surprising, meaningful discoveries as a result. New search paradigms, such as AI-facilitated dialogues and automated information synthesis approaches also threaten to steal the limelight from browsing as an important ‘serendipity engine.’ We should not let this happen; the Knowledge Organisation community has a vital role to play in supporting all forms of knowledge discovery, including browsing. In this session, I will first propose that the community already has the necessary ‘building blocks’ of knowledge organisation to better support the making of surprising, meaningful discoveries through browsing. We will then explore, through an interactive discussion and co-creation exercise, what might make connections surprising and meaningful and how to facilitate making them through better knowledge organisation.

Information Quality and its Impact on Enterprise Search Satisfaction

Research undertaken by Cleverley and Burnett in 2018 indicated that issues around technology, content and training play an equal role in achieving enterprise search satisfaction. There are currently around 90 companies offering enterprise search solutions, most of them suggesting that their technology can solve all the issues experienced by users of enterprise search. In this presentation the impact of eight information quality factors on enterprise search satisfaction will be considered in the light of the availability of generational applications such as ChatGPT promising the optimal answer to any searching question. The presentation will conclude with a consideration of the potential role of large language models in enterprise content applications

PETER WINSTANLEY 

Is an Upper Ontology Useful?

Ontologies play a fundamental role in information integration using semantic technologies. Whilst most ontologies are specific to a single domain, other ontologies provide a level of integration for these domain-specific ontologies and should be the starting point of any domain ontology work. They are referred to as 'upper ontologies'. This presentation will consider the benefits of using an upper level ontology and illustrate how they might be deployed in everyday use.

Visual Representations of Knowledge Structures for Information Discovery

Visual representations reflecting the order and structure of knowledge have been used for hundreds of years. In the current digital age, many modern computerized approaches have allowed for innovative visual deliveries of information and knowledge in addition to the long-standing, inherent fundamental structures and theories of knowledge representation. This presentation focuses on the hierarchical structures of knowledge organization, aiming to connect theories and practices for certain structures, norms, and best practices, explores their variances in applications with or without quantitative measurements, and discusses the functions of visual representation methods and layouts that enable consequential information discovery and ultimate user experience in the data-driven age.