November 12, 2008 8:12 am
Published by Fran
Thanks to Darren at UCL for this: Reimagining the Future of Your Desktop in 3D. It’s a new way of rendering a desktop, using what they describe as the affordances of physical storage. So, you can heap documents in piles, scatter them, regroup them and so on, very easily. I liked the range of ways of browsing piles of documents and thought it looked like fun, but without using it for a while, can’t be sure that it would save me time in the long run. I fear it would entice me into spending even more time than I do... Read more »
November 6, 2008 6:58 am
Published by Fran
ISKO UK Conference 2009 – call for papers. ISKO UK 2009 will provide a rare opportunity for researchers, practitioners and innovators from all sectors to share ideas on the opportunities and challenges implicit in the digitization and networking of diverse information resources. The Conference will address issues in the organization and integration of text, images, data and voice – multimedia and multilingual.
November 6, 2008 6:56 am
Published by Fran
UDC Seminar 2009 – call for papers. The “Classification at a Crossroads” conference will address the potential of classification, the Universal Decimal Classification in particular, in supporting information organization, management and resource discovery in the networked environment. It will explore solutions for better subject access control and vocabulary sharing services.
November 6, 2008 6:55 am
Published by Fran
Digital Humanities 2009 » Call for Papers. Digital Humanities 2009–the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs–will be hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park, USA. Suitable subjects for proposals include, for example, * text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning * libraries, archives and the creation, delivery, management and preservation of humanities digital resources * computer-based research and computing applications in... Read more »
November 4, 2008 2:42 pm
Published by Fran
I very much enjoyed the presentations given at the ISKO UK event on semantic analysis technologies yesterday and was particularly heartened by the emphasis placed by almost all of the speakers on the need for a human factor to train, maintain, and moderate software systems. My overall impression was that you can have complex software systems that work very well, but you need a lot of human input to set them up – feeding them carefully crafted controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and especially ontologies – and preferably checking their output. The first presentation by Luca Scagliarini of Expert System outlined their... Read more »
October 30, 2008 3:01 pm
Published by Fran
Thanks to iaplay and icanhascheezeburger for this!
October 30, 2008 2:54 pm
Published by Fran
How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management: Three Predictions makes the semantic web sound so easy! Well worth reading for a very straightforward overview of what’s involved.
October 25, 2008 9:26 am
Published by Fran
In Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy Elaine Petersen argues that as folksonomy is underpinned by relativism, it will always be flawed as an information retrieval method. So, folksonomy will collapse because everything ends up tagged with every conceivable tag so they all cancel each other out and you might as well have not bothered tagging anything. On the other hand, David Weinberger in Why tagging matters? claims that taxonomy will fail because taxonomists want to invent one single taxonomy to classify everything in the entire world and in a totalitarian style insist that the one true taxonomy... Read more »
October 19, 2008 12:34 pm
Published by Fran
Stuff or love? How metaphors direct our efforts to manage knowledge in organisations by Daniel G. Andriessen, in the Journal of Knowledge Management Research & Practice, is a charming paper proposing that the metaphors we use to describe knowledge affect the way that it is managed. Managers often talk about knowledge as a commodity or resource to be exploited – it has a finite value, can be traded, conserved, wasted, and presumably can run out. Having discussed various metaphors of knowledge as a resource, Andriessen asked people to talk about knowledge thinking of it as love. He says: “The topic... Read more »
October 15, 2008 5:21 am
Published by Fran
I was drawn to Venkat’s post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog via What Ralph Knows. Venkat suggests that Knowledge Management and Social Media are in conflict, with younger people preferring an anarchic, organic approach to building knowledge repositories, while older people prefer highly planned structures, and Generation X (of which I am one) remain neutral. I’m always a bit suspicious of generational divisions, as there are plenty of older innovators and young reactionaries, but I must admit I take a “best of both worlds” approach – so I conform to my generational stereotype! I think the “battle” mirrors the taxonomy/folksonomy... Read more »