Online seminar with Yi-Yun Cheng and Inkyung Choi
ISKO UK invites the knowledge organization community to the next session of its Research Observatory series. Yi-Yun Cheng (Rutgers University) and Inkyung Choi (Sungkyunkwan University) will present "Warrant as Provenance: Connecting Vocabulary Changes to Their Sources". The session will be held on Zoom and attendance is free.
Date: Wednesday, 30 September 2026
Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM, London time
Location: Online, via Zoom
Registration: Free. Register at https://www.iskouk.org/event-6846999
About the talk
Vocabularies change, and users increasingly need to know why. Well-maintained KOSs already keep provenance for their own purposes. The Getty AAT records the sources behind every term and a revision history as Linked Open Data. STW publishes version-to-version deltas. In both, the record of what changed and the record of what evidence exists remain separate. Drawing on three studies (a conceptual model built from DDC editorial records, LLM-assisted extraction of warrant from those records, and the ProvKOS application profile), this talk proposes treating editorial warrant as a PROV chain. An entity points to the typed editorial activity that changed it. The activity points to its warrant, and warrants cite further sources. AAT and STW can adopt this as an optional layer over their existing data, which turns source lists and change logs into queryable editorial decisions.
About the speakers
Yi-Yun Cheng is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research addresses interoperability problems in taxonomies, with applications in the biodiversity and geographic domains. Her work has appeared in JASIST, Information Processing & Management, Journal of Documentation and Knowledge Organization. She leads an IMLS-funded project on provenance and is co-investigator on a U.S. Department of Transportation grant for taxonomy development.
Inkyung Choi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at Sungkyunkwan University. She was previously Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Associate Research Scientist at OCLC Research. She holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A FAIR Fellow, she specializes in metadata architecture, ontology engineering and knowledge organization, with a focus on applying the FAIR principles to improve data interoperability and reuse.
Full speaker biographies: https://www.iskouk.org/KORO-speakers
