Plenary speaker: Panos Constantopoulos

We are delighted to announce Professor Panos Constantopoulos to speak at IFLA Congress 2019!

Panos Constantopoulos is Professor in the Department of Informatics, Director of the MSc Programme in Digital Methods for the Humanities, and former Dean of the School of Information Sciences and Technology,
Athens University of Economics and Business.

He is also affiliated with the Information Management Systems Institute of the “Athena” Research Centre, where he founded and heads the Digital Curation Unit. He has previously been Professor and Chairman in the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete. He has founded and headed for 12 years the Information Systems Laboratory and the Centre for Cultural Informatics at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas.

His scientific interests include: knowledge representation and conceptual modelling, ontology engineering, semantic information access, process mining, knowledge management systems, decision support systems, cultural informatics, digital libraries, digital curation and preservation. He currently is the scientific coordinator of “APOLLONIS-Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation”, which joins the Greek components of CLARIN and DARIAH.

From the catalogue to the virtual information space

Libraries have always been knowledge vaults, serving as indispensable infrastructure for research, education, and an array of important social functions. With time, sophisticated knowledge organization systems have been developed that support the access to the content of libraries.

Effectively, these systems reflect our perception of various domains of knowledge through agreed, yet evolving, organizational schemes. The contents of libraries also undergo an important evolution: not only do the documents of knowledge become increasingly digital, they also come at widely different media and levels of granularity, from books, to articles, to images, tables, datasets, video, audio, etc., each independently identified.

In addition, the entanglement of research processes with information processes becomes tighter in digital environments. In this talk we will review, in the context of these trends, the potential for knowledge access and integration offered by ontology-driven semantic graph indexing. We will also try to show that a wider margin for effective knowledge access is enjoyed when data and process-oriented approaches are combined, especially in view of the increasing ability to use automatic knowledge extraction and indexing techniques.

Libraries are thus facing the opportunity and challenge to create connected information spaces rendering, as close as possible, the rapidly evolving body of knowledge.