September 26, 2010 12:54 pm
Published by Fran
The Voice of Reason (or What’s in a name? online) is a fascinating article by David Robson in New Scientist on one of my favourite topics – how language affects the way we think. The “linguistic relativity” theory of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf – one of my favourite hypotheses – is blamed for the “fall from grace” of the idea that language shapes thought. The work of Eleanor Rosch – one of my favourite psychologists – on categorisation appeared to contradict the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, by showing that categorisation rests more on physiological characteristics of humans – how we see,... Read more »
September 18, 2010 7:30 am
Published by Fran
I thoroughly enjoyed the Linked Data one-day conference organised by ISKO UK last week. You can find my summary of it on the ISKO UK blog.
September 9, 2010 1:37 pm
Published by Fran
The last presentation at the DAM conference back in June was by a very interesting DAM specialist – Mark Davey – of Cliffe Associates and Digital Asset Mangement.org.uk who spoke engagingly about the increasing pervasiveness of metadata and how it is opening up a whole new world of connections and possibilities. Internet of Things He talked about the emerging Internet of Things and how this will – essentially – be enabled by metadata. The more sophisticated our metadata management, the more use we will be able to make of links and connections. The semantic web is a bold attempt to... Read more »
August 1, 2010 12:57 pm
Published by Fran
This is another write-up from the Henry Stewart DAM London conference. Identity and identification Robin Wilson discussed the issue of content identifiers, which are vitally important for digital rights management, but yet tend to be overlooked. He argued that although people become engaged in debates about titles and the language used in labels and classification systems, people overlook the need to achieve consensus on basic identification. (I was quite surprised, as I have always thought that people would argue passionately about what something should be called and how using the wrong terminology affects usability, but that they would settle on... Read more »
July 3, 2010 11:00 am
Published by Fran
This is the first of a series of summaries of the Henry Stewart DAM London conference on June 30, chaired by David Lipsey. The panels (one of which included me) were a pleasing mix of very practical information and more theoretical discussion. Classic DAM vendor “overstatements” Theresa Regli, who does a great job as a “professional sceptic” stressed the need for a calm and considered approach to procurement with the most important stage being the testing stage. You wouldn’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive, but people buy software without finding out if it can handle... Read more »
June 15, 2010 8:24 am
Published by Fran
The “semantic web” is an expression that has been used for long enough now that I for one feel I ought to know what it means, but it is hard to know where to start when so much about it is presented in “techspeak”. I am trying to understand it all in my own non-technical terms, so this post is aimed at “semantic wannabes” rather than “semantic aficionados”. It suggests some ways of starting to think about the semantic web and linked open data without worrying about the technicalities. At a very basic level, the semantic web is something that... Read more »
May 2, 2010 1:40 pm
Published by Fran
First we had content, then not long after that we had metadata, although no-one called it that. Now we need parametadata – the metadata about metadata! Neither metadata nor parametadata are anything new, but what is new is how central they have become to all sorts of business processes. People think there is something modern and techie about metadata, but ever since the first author signed their initials on a piece of work, or added a title, we have had metadata. Librarians are just one group who have been using metadata for centuries. Thanks to technological advances, there is now... Read more »
April 27, 2010 12:02 am
Published by Fran
There have been lots of interesting presentations at Web Science 2010 in Raleigh. My metadata meerkats were popular – hard to beat charismatic megafauna. The papers and posters are online at The Journal of Web Science.
April 4, 2010 7:45 am
Published by Fran
What is an ontology? Ontologies are emerging from the techie background into the knowledge organisation foreground and – as usually happens – being touted as the new panacea to solve all problems from content management to curing headaches. As with any tool, there are circumstances where they work brilliantly and some where they aren’t right for the job. Basically, an ontology is a knowledge model (like a taxonomy or a flow chart) that describes relationships between things. The main difference between ontologies and taxonomies is that taxonomies are restricted to broader and narrower relationships whereas ontologies can hold any kind... Read more »
March 14, 2010 3:24 pm
Published by Fran
This post is based on the notes I made for the talk I gave at the LIKE dinner on February 25th. It covers a lot of themes I have discussed elsewhere on this blog, but I hope it will be useful as an overview. Taxonomies have been around for ages Pretty much the oldest form of recorded human writing is the list, back in ancient Sumeria, the Sumerian King list for example is about 4,000 years old. By the time of the ancient Greeks, taxonomies were familiar. We understand that something is a part of something else, and the notion... Read more »