LIASA IGBIS, your Interest Group for Bibliographic Standards, is pleased to announce our upcoming webinar with guest speaker Wynand van der Walt from Rhodes University Library.

Wynand’s focus during this session is on the representation of localised African knowledge in semantic web frameworks and bridging the gap through metadata. The presentation delves into the prevalent use of Western taxonomies as authoritative reference points, overshadowing indigenous and subject-specific knowledge systems.

Through an exploration of the Environmental Learning Resources Centre (ELRC) at Rhodes University, as a representative entity, the session sheds light on the disconnect between the language employed and the controlled vocabularies used to characterise research outputs. It examines the dynamics between Controlled Vocabularies, Folksonomies, and Ontologies, emphasising the social construct inherent in knowledge representation.

Highlighting the significance of representing subject specialisation within an Africanisation context, the presentation advocates using Wikidata as an upper ontological linking framework within the semantic web, fostering a more inclusive and diverse landscape of knowledge representation.

Wynand van der Walt is Senior Manager: Innovation, Systems and Collections at Rhodes University Library, as well as Director of KAIMSAfrica, a consulting and training services company for the Knowledge and information Provisioning sector. Wynand holds a Masters in IT from the University of Pretoria and is currently enrolled for a PhD at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). His areas of interest are leadership for innovation; digitisation and digital curation; scholarly communication; indigenous knowledge systems; fluid ontologies; and the semantic web and how it affects information-related technologies.