Richard P. Smiraglia is Professor in the Knowledge Organization Research Group of the iSchool at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA. He is author of more than 300 publications in information science and knowledge organization. His work explores ontology extraction and evolution of knowledge in domains, epistemological analysis of the cultural role of authorship, the representation of knowledge in knowledge organization systems, and the phenomenon of instantiation among information objects.
The expertise of professor Smiraglia in these domains will contribute to the further development of the DANS services and to more insight in the history, evolution and mutual dependencies of the different domain-specific knowledge organization systems DANS sees itself confronted with. For the Digital Humanities, a strong user community of DANS, the expertise of Professor Smiraglia is equally important. New questions regarding new technologies manifest themselves, such as how to order, describe and classify the different sources (the data repositories, the catalogues, the classification schemes used), as can be observed in any research infrastructure of the Humanities. The challenge is to embrace new technologies without losing what is important in the Humanities: variety, contextuality, sophistication. Professor Smiraglia’s research programme as Visiting KNAW Professor will focus on using DANS’ data collections as use cases for advising large-scale infrastructure in the areas of scaling, interoperability and Linked Open Data publication in the field of humanities and social sciences. His expertise will also be utilized to advise on similar developments in other scientific data domains.
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Professor Smiraglia is the fourth KNAW Visiting Professor DANS has the privilege to host. Former visiting fellows were Herbert van de Sompel, Katy Börner and Christine Borgman. Please contact Andrea Scharnhorst for more information.
