V Międzynarodowa Konferencja Naukowa Nauka o informacji (informacja naukowa) w okresie zmian Innowacyjne usługi informacyjne. Wydział Dziennikarstwa, Informacji i Bibliologii Katedra Informatologii, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Warszawa, 15 – 16 maja 2017

1. Ethical Dimension in Knowledge Organization
Systems and Applicable Architecture for
Intercultural User Interface
Tan Tran, University of Lille 3
The 4th International Scientific Conference
Information Science in the Age of Change
Warsaw, 15th – 16th May 2017

2. Context : Integration of KOS in digital environments
The pre-eminent challenge we face in knowledge organization
and representation is heterogeneity of systems both at the
level of expressions and structure of conceptual content.
KOS can improve access to document contents in digital or
hybrid collections and are essential in heterogeneous
collections of documents.

3. Epistemic stances
There is not one epistemic stance ; there are many, and we
need to know how to relate to that situation.

4. A guide to Call Numbers : W. Gombrowicz’s Cosmos
PG : Slavic, Baltic and Albanian is a subclass in the Library of Congress Classification
system, under the heading Class P – Language and Literature.

5. A guide to Call Numbers : W. Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (2)
Subclass PZ - Fiction and juvenile belles lettres

6. A guide to Call Numbers : W. Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (3)
142 Critical philosophy | 143 Intuitionism Bergsonism | 144 Humanism related
systems | 145 Sensationalism

7. Research questions
What levels of interoperability are needed to improve the
integration among local KOS and to move forward to a global
KOS ?
Can cultural interoperability be the solution for knowledge
discovery in multilingual and multicultural contexts ?
Can we provide an intercultural interface by delivering full
integration of KOS ?

8. Interoperability
Carney & al. (2005)
The essence of interoperability is that it is a relationship between
systems, where each relationship is a manner of communication,
exchange, cooperation and sharing.
Miller (2002)
...to be interoperable, one should actively be engaged in the
ongoing process of ensuring that the systems, procedures and
culture of an organization are managed in such a way as to
maximize opportunities for exchange and re-use of information,
whether internally or externally

9. Example of classification mapping

10. Different levels of interoperability
”While syntactic and functional levels may focus on protocols
used for information retrieval and communication systems, the
semantic level concerns the understandings and meanings of
interchanged data”(Chung & Moen 2007).
Winslow et al. (2001) consider cultural interoperability in
military and diplomatic contexts (cited by Favier & Mustafa
El Hadi 2013).
Mustafa El Hadi (2015) further regards thesauri as one of the
key elements for considering cultural interoperability and for
examining KOS’ capability to accommodate complex cultural
demands.

11. Theoretical construction of KO’s cultural dimension
Beghtol (2002a, p. 511)
Cultural warrant means that any kind of knowledge representation
and/or organization system can be maximally appropriate and
useful for the individuals in some culture only if it is based on the
assumptions, values, and predispositions of that same culture.
Beghtol (2002b, p. 47)
Hospitality is the ability of a notation to admit new concepts
appropriately and to accommodate them in the correct
relationships with other concepts. [...] fundamental tenet of
cultural hospitality is that knowledge organization systems should
be ”permeable”to different cultural attitudes and practices.

12. Theoretical construction of KO’s cultural dimension (2)
The integration of multiple knowledge representation systems
or knowledge organization schemes is constrained by
limitations on the universality of human conceptual systems
(Green, Bean & Hudon 2002).
Most efforts are being put on the development of multilingual
systems and local adaptations to feed those systems. But
language is one of the many aspects (Hajdu Bar´at 2008).

13. Gender as a cultural aspect
Olson Hope and her team mapped the DDC to a feminist
context using ”A Women’s Thesaurus”(Capek 1987)
When the terms from A Women’s Thesaurus were mapped to
DDC, the term“feminism”was assigned the number 305.42 :

14. Gender as a cultural aspect (2)
A space was created for feminism and feminist theory in the
140s (Kublik et al. 2003).

15. Towards an applicable architecture for intercultural
interface

16. Domain Analysis as an approach
The domain is something that ”has a boundary, a specific
terminology, basic units concepts, terms, semantic relations,
classification schemes and a shared ontology”(Hjørland &
Albrechtsen 1995).
The domain is“an area of expertise, a body of literature, or a
group of people working together in an organization”(Mai
2005).
Smiraglia (2012) argues that the domain is ”a group with an
ontological base that reveals an underlying teleology, a set of
common hypotheses, epistemological consensus on
methodological approaches, and social semantics.”

17. Domain Analysis as an approach (2)
Smiraglia (2012) considers the domain as a unit of analysis for
the construction of a KOS.
Mustafa El Hadi (2008, 2015) suggests the use of reference
tools such as terminologies and thesauri to retrieve the
construction and sharing of meaning which refers to a
”community of experts”or ”discourse community”.
Guimar˜aes, Mart´ınez-´Avila & Alves (2015) advocate the
bibliometrical approach to identify theoretical referents and
“epistemic communities”within the domain of the researchers.

18. Building and testing the conceptual model

19. Conclusion
The intercultural interface should be designed in such a way
that users from a given culture would adapt a universal
language to their context and use it to interoperate with other
cultures, taking advantage of a distributed network of
adaptations.

20. Epilogue

21. Epilogue (2)
The indigenous Australian artists create paintings that
represent places in their dreams.

22. References
Bar´at, ´A. H. (2008). Knowledge Organization in the Cross-cultural and
Multicultural Society. In Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vol. 11, 91–97.
Beghtol, C. (2002). A proposed ethical warrant for global knowledge
representation and organization systems. Journal of Documentation, 58(5),
507–532.
Beghtol, C. (2002). Universal concepts, cultural warrant and cultural hospitality.
In Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vol. 8, 45–49.
Hudon, M. (1997). Multilingual thesaurus construction-integrating the views of
different cultures in one gateway to knowledge and concepts. Information
Services Use, 17(2/3), 111–123.
Kublik, A., Clevette, V., Ward, D., Olson, H. (2003). Adapting Dominant
Classifications to Particular Contexts. Cataloging Classification Quarterly,
37(1–2), 13–31.
Mustafa El Hadi, W. (2008). Discourse Community Analysis Sense Construction
Versus Non- Sense Construction. In Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vol.
11, 302–306.
Mustafa El Hadi, W. (2015). Cultural Interoperability and Knowledge
Organization Systems. In Proceedings of the 3rd Brazilian ISKO-Conference
(pp. 575–606).
Smiragilia, R. (2012). Epistemology of Domain Analysis. In Cultural Frames of
Knowledge, Ergon Verlag, pp 111-124.

23. Thank you for your attention !
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