The 18th International Conference on Open Repositories, OR2023, will be held from 12-15 June 2023 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The organisers are pleased to invite contributions to the programme. The conference theme is: ‘Repositories unlocked for discovery and interoperability’.
The web was designed as an information space with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also to allow communication facilitated by machines. The OR2023 conference will focus on the practices of the international repositories community to develop and implement the standards, frameworks, architectures, and methodologies for open repositories to serve as knowledge representation databases for the structured web of data.
Invitation to participate
OR2023 will provide an opportunity to explore and reflect on the ways repositories enable the discoverability and interoperability of information and data within the structured web of data. How can we better utilise repositories for machine interoperability? How can we develop the capacity of institutions to implement sustainable open repositories to improve data equity worldwide?
The organisers particularly welcome proposals on the overall ‘Repositories unlocked for discovery and interoperability’ theme, but also on other administrative, organisational, or practical topics related to digital repositories. They are interested in the following sub-themes:
1. Unbiased discovery of knowledge:
- Equity and democratisation of knowledge.
- Open repositories facilitating the unbiased discovery of indigenous knowledge.
- Inclusion of marginalised and underrepresented voices.
- Local knowledge sharing
2. Sustainable development:
- Linking open repositories content to the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- Supporting knowledge in the service of society, encouraging non-academic use.
- Repositories and global knowledge.
3. Linked data:
- Integration with other open knowledge resources (e.g., Wikimedia and Wikidata).
- Linking repositories to aggregate data stores and the world of NoSQL and Graph databases.
- Linked data with metadata schemas.
4. Trust in the machine:
- The machine as a user.
- Integrating repository content with the semantic web of data using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) knowledge representation language.
- Data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
- New technologies for standardising visualisation (IIIF), harnessing AI.
5. Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS):
- Taxonomies and ontologies in open repositories to enhance the discoverability of data.
- Processes of knowledge engineering with repositories’ data by creating formal representation of objects and relations within a domain.
- Metadata schemas and the conversion of schemas to formats that can be expressed in RDF triples.
6. Integrating content:
- Interoperability vs integration.
- Novel or complex formats, data types and sources.
- Big data, large and complex datasets.
7. Repositioning repositories:
- Reinvesting and reskilling in the latest digital repository platforms.
- Next gen repositories, the Pubfair framework and new models.
- Convergence and integration with other types of systems (e.g., current research information systems, digital asset management systems, publishing, and e-learning platforms, ORCID).
Key Dates
- 15 January 2023: Deadline for submissions
- 20 February 2023: Submitters notified of acceptance of full presentation, 24×7, workshop, poster, and developer track proposals
- 20 March 2023: Registration opens
- 12-15 June 2023: OR2023 conference
To find out more about the submission process, please visit the OR2023 website.
