NASKO 2025: Multi-Purpose KO: Risks, Challenges and Opportunities
Call for Participation
Conference Dates: June 19-20, 2025
Conference information can be found here.
Deadline for Proposals: February 21, 2025
We’ve been aware for some time of the widespread re-use of data, be it in the form of data warehousing, linked data systems, or big data solutions. We have studied the opportunities, in the form of providing novel and innovative solutions to long-standing problems. We have also studied the dangers, in the form of what Cathy O’Neil has called “Weapons of Math Destruction”: the adoption of discriminatory and abusive practices based on inadequate and intrusive algorithms.
For NASKO 2025, we’d like to ratchet the debate up to the level of knowledge organization systems. What happens when the very systems we use to organize information, and the theories that underlie them, and the discourse through which we revise and improve them, are subject to the same re-use? How can systems such as large language learning models adopt and adapt our thesauri, our ontologies, our vocabularies, and our classification systems as means of bringing coherence to the data they harvest from multiple sources? Do the very debates in our field, once aired and published, provide the raw resources for artificial intelligence?
While we happily welcome research in all aspects of knowledge organization, as always, we hope that our 2025 conference will provide us an opportunity to address a phenomenon we can expect to see recurring with greater frequency: seeing tools, ideas and paradigms that we developed for one purpose being used for a different one, and sometimes a purpose we do not altogether comprehend, and which we may not ethically support.
The Tenth North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO 2025) seeks to address these issues, as well as to reflect on the full continuum of KO activity, from research exploring community, people, and human-driven practices, to computational and technical approaches, and to theoretical research focusing on core practices in KO. NASKO 2025 invites submissions covering, but not limited to, KO history and foundations, theory, epistemological stances, domain analytical approaches, community of practices, community representation and misrepresentation, digital life-cycle, and computational approaches. Researchers studying topics from a KO perspective, including students, practitioners (e.g. librarians, archivists, information managers), and scholars from domains including information science, library science, human-computer interaction, and others are welcome to submit.
Proposal Categories include: Research (Full) Papers and Short Research Papers(described below).
Instructions
Proposals for research papers, short papers, and the doctoral symposium are welcomed. Acceptable languages for conference submissions include English, Portuguese, French, or Spanish. Graduate students are especially encouraged to submit proposals.
All proposals should be e-mailed as an attachment in MS-WORD to Grant Campbell, Program Chair, at nasko2025@uwo.ca.
The proposals themselves must be anonymized.In the e-mail, please provide:
1. The title of the proposal (which must also appear on the proposal itself)
2. The name(s) of the author(s), their complete mailing and e-mail addresses, and their telephone numbers
3. Category of Submission: Research Paper or Short Paper.
Proposal categories:
Research (Full) Papers:
Proposals should include a title and be no more than 1500 words with citations (citations not included in word count). Proposals should situate themselves within the extant literature of knowledge organization, and have a clearly articulated theoretical grounding and methodology. Those that report on completed or ongoing work will be given preference. Diverse perspectives and methodologies are welcome.
Research paper proposals undergo a rigorous double-blind review process. Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. Authors will develop accepted full paper proposals into full papers (4,000+ words); full papers will be published in the proceedings in the language of submission, and presented as paper presentations at the conference in English. 20 minutes presentation.
Short Papers:
Proposals should include a title and be no more than 1000 words with citations (citations not included in word count). A short paper could present a more focused study of smaller scope than a full paper. For example, work in progress, preliminary research analysis, or late-breaking results are suitable for short papers. Accepted short papers will be published in the proceedings, and presented as short paper presentations at the conference.
Short paper proposals undergo a rigorous double-blind review process. Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. Authors will develop accepted short paper proposals into short papers (1,500-3,000 words); short papers will be published in the proceedings in the language of submission, and presented as paper presentations at the conference in English. 10 minutes presentation.
Publication:
All accepted papers will be published online in the University of Washington Archive (https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/nasko/index); an open access repository. The papers most highly-ranked during the peer-review process will, with permission of the authors, be published in full in a future issue of Knowledge Organization.