Upcoming Events

Access Innovations frequently speaks, moderates, sponsors, and exhibits at industry events throughout the year. Below is a list of Access Innovations upcoming events where you can find our team. Please stop by and say hello! To see other previous presentations, visit our Presentations page.

LavaCon 2026, 24th Annual Conference

October 25-28, 2026 at the Le Meridien/Sheraton Charlotte; Charlotte, NC
For more information, Click HERE for Information and Registration for LavaCon 2026

Knowledge Organization Research Observatory

For more information, Click HERE for Information and Registration for this talk

Research Observatory: ISO 25964 Parts 1 and 2 – The Process and the Progress, Status, and Outcomes

Presentation by Marjorie Hlava
October 28, 2026; 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm GMT

Support for search and tagging using controlled vocabularies has been the main focus of the ISO 25964 standard, Thesauri and Interoperability with other Vocabularies, but this support has recently been complicated by the rise of ChatGPT and Generative AI.  The changes in the information access and distribution as well as the usage options expansion with recent applications in daily life automation clearly impact the expanded use cases. Updating the standard to the situation we face today and expect to face in the next 5 years has prompted a massive rewriting of the standard to bring it in line with today’s needs.

Specifically, as the convener, she will cover the actions of the Working Group for ISO/TC 46/SC 9/WG 8 Information and documentation, during the revision of ISO 25964 (Thesauri and Interoperability with other knowledge organization systems). ISO 25964 Part 1: Thesauri for Information Retrieval, creation, management, and use, which just completed its two years revision and released recently. Then move on to on-going revision of Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies which covers interoperability between different thesauri and with other types of knowledge organization systems (KOS).

KMWorld 2026

November 16-19, 2026 at the JW Marriott; Washington, DC
For more information, Click HERE for Information and Registration for KMWorld 2026

Semantic Technologies and Search: From Finding Words to Finding Meaning

Presentation by Marjorie Hlava
November 18, 2026; 10:30 am EST

Search has evolved from keyword matching and structured indexing toward increasingly sophisticated approaches based on semantic similarity, natural-language queries, and artificial intelligence. Yet an important challenge remains: finding information that is not only similar to a query, but meaningful within the context of an organization’s knowledge, terminology, and information environment.

This presentation examines how semantic technologies—including taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, controlled vocabularies, metadata, entities, and semantic relationships—can improve information retrieval. It considers the differences between traditional lexical search, vector-based retrieval, and retrieval informed by explicit organizational semantics.

A particular focus is the Semantic Gateway as an architectural pattern: a layer that can interpret queries, normalize terminology, enrich information with semantic context, identify relationships, and connect users and applications with relevant information across multiple sources. Rather than replacing existing search engines or retrieval technologies, such a layer can provide additional context that helps them perform more effectively.

The presentation explores practical examples of how relationships such as broader, narrower, equivalent, and associative concepts can affect retrieval, as well as the potential benefits and limitations of semantic enrichment. It also considers how the same semantic infrastructure can support enterprise search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge discovery, and AI agents.

Finally, the presentation proposes ways to evaluate semantic retrieval objectively, including recall, precision, zero-result rates, query reformulation, time to useful answers, user assessment, and provenance.

The central question is not whether traditional search or AI search is “better,” but how organizational knowledge can be represented and made available so that search systems—and increasingly AI systems—can retrieve information in a way that reflects meaning, context, and relationships.