My article "A cooperative environment for the negotiation of term taxonomies in digital libraries", co-authored with Matteo Cristani and Roberta Cuel, has been accepted for pubblication in the Special Issue on Digital Libraries in the Knowledge Era: Knowledge Management and Semantic Web Technology of the Library Management Journal.

Several systems for the management of digital libraries have evolved in the recent past from simple document repository to sophisticated applications that provide the possibility of classifying and in some cases event rating the documents collected in the library itself. In some of those systems members of the community of practice that uses and produces the library itself can also be active in assigning a reputation score to each other. Clearly, the evolution of a library consists in both the evolution of the reputation scores and in the taxonomy underlying the classification of documents. Moreover, the documents themselves can be assigned to the taxonomy in a mechanical way or by hands.
We propose here a model for a system which summarizes all the positive aspects of the above mentioned approaches: (1) the documents are scored by the members who can be either authors or readers. The score of a document is a function of the scores assigned by the reviewers, their reputation and their competence in the topic of the document, which is defined as the distance in the space of topics between a topic and an individual, represented as a point in the space of topics that summarizes the documents she wrote; (2) author reputation depends on the scores of the papers she wrote; (3) the classification taxonomy is used to classify documents based upon linguistic terms that occur in the document; (4) the taxonomy is not static, since members of the community can propose to change it, and the change proposal is polled so that the votes of the members are counted in a way that depends upon their reputation.