UKOLN News

Marieke Guy, Interoperability Focus Officer, UKOLN, will give a presentation entitled “Wiki or Won’t He?” during the ILI session (A103) on Wikis and Social Software, 16 October. Marieke will consider the highs and lows of establishing a public sector wiki; she will also examine the notion that setting one up might be a “cheap and cheerful” way to get people talking and achieving consensus.

Julie Allinson of UKOLN will be running a tutorial with Andy Powell from the Eduserv Foundation at the forthcoming Open Scholarship 2006 conference. The tutorial will offer an introduction to the Eprints Application Profile which makes use of the Dublin Core Abstract Model and FRBR to group together descriptions of different expressions of a work. The tutorial will be of use to anybody with an interest in metadata, particularly the metadata used to describe scholarly works in institutional, and other, repositories.

Maureen Pennock has been invited to chair the conference of the same name organised by Interactive Business Events in Manchester on 12 October 2006. The conference will examine how public sector bodies may effectively address the email challenge they face by introducing policies to manage emails as records in accordance with growing legal and regulatory requirements. The programme will include case studies, a workshop session, round table and panel discussions and speakers from a wide range of organisations.

UKOLN and JISC have just published a comprehensive review of terminology services and technology, written by Douglas Tudhope, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. The JISC Capital Programme call (September 2006) points to it as briefing information and selects various recommendations as invited topics for projects, i.e. in the repositories section: a semantic interoperability demonstrator combining established vocabularies and social tagging, text mining tools, name authority and terminology registry services. Other parts of the publication describe different types of vocabularies and place terminology services in user and information life cycle contexts. They also cover vocabulary mapping and automatic classification/indexing, systematically investigate potential Terminology Web Services and investigate needed identifiers, protocols and standards.