I came just a few hours ago home from this year's ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) conference that was held quite appropriately in Rome. This was my first ISKO conference and one quite remarkable difference with an average information science conference and ISKO meeting seemed to be that when in those other conferences deeply theoretical discussions are typically quite rare, here it was quite the opposite. Because of the strong theoretical underpinnings of ven very practical knowledge organisation, it is rather clear that the theoretical understanding of what is being done is here even more significant than on a number of other fields of information science where the practical practice, supporting and understanding it form the baseline of the research.
My own paper was about whether tag clusters formed around single subjective descritive tags in social KOSs represent identifiable topics. A pilot study in Flickr gave promising results although the particular subject warrants further research. To mention a couple of interesting papers, Marianne Lykke (Royal School of LIS) presented interesting developments of a study of indexing using semantic components instead of keywords. Judith Simon (CNRS) talked about reputation in social KOSs and how it affects organisation of knowledge. Considering my interest in virtual realities, the keynote address by W. Boyd Rayward about Paul Otlet's 'virtual realities' was also very interesting even though I was unfortunate to miss the first part of it.
