Welcome and introduction by:

• Marta Fattori, head, Faculty of Philosophy

• Alessandro Gebbia, head, Department of English Studies

• Maria J. Lopez-Huertas, president, ISKO

• Fulvio Mazzocchi, conference chair, ISKO 2010

• Claudio Gnoli, programme chair, ISKO 2010

Welcome by the programme chair

Greetings everybody. We were honoured when ISKO asked our Italian chapter to organize the international conference of this year. We got excited and worried at the same time for such an important opportunity. After some consultation with other Italian members, we identified Fulvio Mazzocchi's research group as a suitable and authoritative team to start with. Since then we have continued to work together for two years in a friendly atmosphere. So, on behalf of the Italian chapter of ISKO, I have to thank very much for their great work the conference chair, Fulvio Mazzocchi, and the other members of the organizing team, Emanuela Casson, Barbara De Santis, and Melissa Tiberi. ISKO is also grateful to the Faculty of Philosophy for hosting the conference and for their help.

We learned how many little things you have to manage at the same time when you organize a conference. For example we were hesitant whether to manage the website in a simpler traditional way, or to approve of an advice to use the Open Conference System free tool. In the end we have used OCS, which allows you to manage a remarkable mass of information automatically, though implying some additional work and restrictions, as any content management system does, to both its end users and its managers: we struggled to persuade it of some ontological facts, like that a coffee break has no abstract...

Many expert scholars also helped by acting as blind reviewers. Among them was our master Brian Vickery, who brilliantly contributed his reviews despite his very late age. It is sad that he cannot see the fruits of his work, as he passed away some months ago, but this will be one more piece of his enduring contribution to our field.

The conference theme was chosen with all the organizing team and a contribution by Mela Bosch. We thought to look again at foundational aspects of knowledge organization, that were addressed in conferences many years old by now, like that on "Conceptual basis of the classification of knowledge" held in Ottawa in 1971, or the second international ISKO conference, on "Cognitive paradigms in knowledge organisation", held in Madras in 1992.

The call for papers had good reactions and attracted an interesting set of papers, some on theoretical foundations and others on their applications to contemporary KO tools. I believe that they offer a quite good representation of the current range of topics in our field, and can stimulate further discussion on them. Despite the international economic crisis and political restrictions, which prevented some people from attending, we enjoy a good participation also from countries far away from our enveloping nation, such as Argentina, Brazil, Canada, United States, Finland, Bulgaria, Hungary, South Africa, and India. The papers of few colleagues who eventually could not attend are also in the proceedings. Our Australian keynote speaker will address knowledge organization from the perspective of an important part of its history, and will be followed this afternoon by some other papers with historical facets. Then we will go on by discussing concepts, terms, knowledge organization systems, their human environment, and so on.

I have to transmit warm wishes for our conference coming from ISKO founder, Ingetraut Dahlberg, who would have liked to be here in person. I hope that you will find our programme interesting enough, and wish you a good time in this villa and in Rome. Thanks everybody for your participation.