Bliss Bibliographic Classification : Annual Lectures

Bliss Classification Association : annual lectures given at Annual General Meetings

2014 : Structural choices for knowledge organization system development, with Social Care Online as a case study The Annual Bliss Classification Association Lecture was given this year by Stella G Dextre Clarke, Information Consultant and Chair of ISKO UK. The meeting was held on Wednesday 9th April 2014 at 3.30pm in the Watson Lecture Theatre, Medawar Building, University College, London.

Stella has provided the following summary of her talk:

Following a usability study in 2011, SCIE (Social Care Institute for Excellence) embarked on a major review and redevelopment of its database Social Care Online (SCO), taking in redesign of its user interface with new search functionality as well as a review of content coverage. One small component of this, in 2012, was a review and redevelopment of its existing controlled vocabulary, the “SCO taxonomy”.

This talk will consider some of the structural challenges that arose during redesign of the vocabulary. It will use the SCO context as a source of examples to explore (to the extent that time permits) three recurrent issues for thesaurus developers:

The preferred term in a thesaurus often represents a lot more than its face value.
The friendliest structure for browsing a document collection may not coincide with the most useful structure for its indexing vocabulary.
Various practical constraints impede use of facet analysis in thesaurus implementation.

The slides that she used in her presentation are here.

2013 : Exploring highly interconnected humanities data: are faceted browsers always the answer? The Annual Bliss Classification Association Lecture was given this year by Dr Michele Pasin, an information architect with the Nature Publishing Group, and John Bradley, of the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. The meeting was held on Friday 19th April 2013 at 2.15pm, in the Lankester Lecture Theatre in the Medawar Building of University College London. The slides that the speakers used in their presentations are here: John Bradley’s slides Michele Pasin’s slides

Michele Pasin is working on issues at the intersection of information architecture, data architecture, and semantic publishing, while John Bradley’s research interests are in computer supported text analysis techniques and tools, graphical text analysis environments, impact of structured data and structured text on humanities scholarship and new areas for potential computer support for humanities scholarship. More background information about the speakers, their current work and research, is given at the links from their names, above.

2012 : Discussion meeting on putting Bliss on the Web. Rather than having an external speaker, this year’s meeting was devoted to discussing the progress that has been made towards putting BC2 on the web, with particular reference to the experimental “wiki” which we think might be a way of obtaining input for development of the scheme from a wider number of people. Some of a draft music schedule has already been put there, and can be seen here.

2011 : No AGM was held in 2011 because of the decision to realign the financial and membership years with the calendar year. The AGM which would have been held in the Autumn of 2011 was therefore postponed to the following spring.

2010 : BC2 past, present and future. The recent sad death of Jack Mills provides an opportunity to assess the state of the revision of BC2, to reflect on progress made, and to consider the future direction of revision in terms of the needs of knowledge organization, and of users in the 21st century. At this AGM Vanda Broughton presented a statement of intent on behalf of the committee, setting out the way in which we plan to take the classification forward. Information about work on new formats, such as the BC2 thesaurus, and a web-enabled version of the schedules, was supplemented by a presentation on editorial strategy and our vision of how the classification will be completed.

2009 : Putting Bliss on the Web: ways of representing faceted classifications. The Bliss Bibliographic Classification is currently the only major system of documentary classification not to have a web version. Although some draft schedules are available as documents on the website, and machine files are maintained for editorial purposes, there is no version of BC2 that takes advantage of the functionality of the web or uses a common format. Recent work has focused on ways in which this might be achieved, either through the development of in-house software, or through the use and adaptation of some standard representation language, such as SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). Some interesting challenges are presented by the complexity of the relationships in a faceted scheme, as outlined by Leonard Will in a talk given at the 2008 AGM, but which, if solutions can be found, promise a higher level of semantic value. Speakers included Tamara Lopez (Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College, London) and Richard Light, XML consultant

2008 : Bliss on the Web. A talk by Leonard Will discussing formats in which classification schemes have been made available on the Web and options for making BC2 available in this way. The slides shown, with some interpolated notes, are available here in pdf format.