Building a meaningful Web: from traditional knowledge organization systems to new semantic tools

The Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) workshop is focused on the transformation of traditional knowledge organization systems (KOSs) to new forms of knowledge representation that are being developed to support a more semantic-based, meaningful Web environment. The goal was to identify principles from more traditional practices that can contribute to the design of new knowledge-organization systems and ways to exploit the extensive intellectual capital available in traditional KOSs when developing new KOS tools. We describe the development of specific Web service functionality applicable to KOSs. The benefits of this service-based approach and the possibility of universal or community-based KOS services were explored. NKOS is an ad hoc group devoted to the discussion of KOSs as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet.