The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic has sped up many healthcare processes and practices. Both stakeholders and standard organizations and authorities had to quickly implement new guidelines and codes to uniquely identify the disease and all the related healthcare data. The object of this work is to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on clinical coding systems, in terms of updates and introduction of new specific codes for the identification of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with the aim of allowing a better description of the disease and interoperability of the clinical data. The analysis is focused on ICD, SNOMED CT, LOINC, ATC as coding systems either included into the Italian EHR regulation or widely used internationally. Results show that coding systems that created a plenty of new codes for Covid-19 have: i) a flexible structure; ii) a speed process for updates; iii) a large user community for inputs. Others instead demonstrated in this circumstance that they are limited by hierarchical structures or excessively cumbersome updating processes, which conflict with the flexibility required to standards to represent the evolution of clinical knowledge. This is especially true in exceptional situation like the pandemic one.

The construction sector is also a knowledge-intensive domain, in which effective and unambiguous communication and knowledge sharing are, at the same time, both essential yet difficult to accomplish. This is primarily due to the several professionals interacting and facing situations involving diverse resources, processes and activities. Each of them brings a different background and perspective, often generating poorly integrated information. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) are crucial for ensuring completeness, consistency and quality of information. Despite the international trend to encourage the development and use of controlled vocabularies, especially classification systems, until recently in Italy the national coordination policy has not been effective enough. This article describes the first national attempt made, the INNOVance Lexicon that collects and organises knowledge about construction products. It combines taxonomic, terminological and semantic aspects of knowledge and it is a reference language to support information exchange and sharing in collaborative context.

There is an increasing recognition of the value of effective systems able to correctly manage terminology and to organize knowledge in specialized domains. This paper is a reflection on the relevance of terminology management and knowledge organization in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry. It highlights the benefits Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) offer to organizations and experts in facilitating the building process management and reengineering. In particular, we present the experience of the Construction Technologies Institute of National Research Council (ITC-CNR), in promoting consistent terminology and knowledge management within collaborative environments. The future perspective of ITC-CNR is to investigate the possibility to exploit specialized terminology and structured knowledge to enable knowledge-reuse, to preserve and make traceable information about artifacts of the built environments, by enclosing formalized knowledge in the Building Information Modelling (BIM), innovative approach which gives the benefits of a common information platform for projects and which will be adopted by governments within the public procurement in the next future. To support this new way to approach the building process, it is important to conceive strategies and solutions suitable for effectively and permanently managing, organizing and storing information, generated from several interactions between professionals and different stages of the building life cycle.

The paper proposes an approach to transcend multicultural and multilingual barriers in the use and reuse of geographical data at the European level. The approach aims at sharing scientific terms in the field of nature conservation with the goal of assisting different user communities with metadata compilation and information discovery. A multi-thesauri solution is proposed, based on a Common Thesaurus Framework for Nature Conservation, where different well-known Knowledge Organization Systems are assembled and shared. It has been designed according to semantic web and W3C recommendations employing SKOS standard models and Linked Data to publish the thesauri as a whole in machine-understandable format. The outcome is a powerful framework satisfying the requirements of modularity and openness for further thesaurus extension and updating, interlinking among thesauri, and exploitability from other systems. The paper supports the employment of Linked Data to deal with terminologies in complex domains such as nature conservation and it proposes a hands-on recipe to publish thesauri in the framework.