October 12, 2008 2:14 pm
Published by Fran
This joint ISKO UK/KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) workshop, hosted by the British Computer Society on October 9th, boasted an impressive menu of speakers and delegates. Alan Pollard (BCS president-elect) welcomed us and Conrad Taylor (KIDMM co-ordinator and organiser of the event) provided a very handy literature review and reading list and summarised concepts of knowledge and its management. He encouraged us to “turn data dumps into real knowledge stores”, referring to Etienne Wenger’s work on Communities of Practice and Karl Popper’s notions of “three worlds” (physical, internal/mental, and socio-cultural). The reification of knowledge was another theme and... Read more »
October 10, 2008 12:50 pm
Published by Fran
Many thanks to Traugott Koch for these links: NKOS Workshop at ECDL in Aarhus. NKOS Special Session at DC 2008 in Berlin, all in one single pdf file. The Joint NKOS/CENDI Workshop “New Dimensions in Knowledge Organization Systems”, in Washington, DC, USA on September 11, 2008. “Thanks to the contributors, programme committees, chairs and the large and very active audiences. We invite your active participation 2009 as well. Watch the website. ”
October 8, 2008 2:06 pm
Published by Fran
The Popularity Contest: Taxonomy Development in the Petabyte Era « Not Otherwise Categorized…. I really enjoyed this excellent analysis of a familiar argument (let’s just Google for information), especially the emphasis on the difficulty of answering the question “why?”. When and where are quite easy ones, but why is really tricky! I also liked the straightforward assertion that bias is not just inevitable in taxonomy, it is what makes a good taxonomy.
October 5, 2008 11:54 am
Published by Fran
I went to an excellent Anglo-French scientific discussion seminar on web archiving on Friday at the Institut Français Cultural Centre in London. The speakers were Gildas Illien of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) (Paris) and Dr Stephen Bury of the British Library (BL). Gildas Ilien described the web archiving project being undertaken by the BnF, using the Heritrix open source crawler to harvest the web from “seeds” (URLs). The crawler was charmingly illustrated with a picture of a “robot” (as people like to be able to see the “robot”), but the “robot” is a bit stupid – he sometimes... Read more »
October 2, 2008 3:58 pm
Published by Fran
Information Architecture for Audio: Doing It Right – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design. Another gem for the ever reliable Boxes and Arrows. The article highlights differences in the way that users interact with text and audio and sets out techniques for improving delivery of audio. For example, starting off a piece of audio by saying how long it will last and a summary of its content is helpful, as you can’t scan audio in the way that you can scan text.
September 27, 2008 11:22 am
Published by Fran
10th ISKO international conference (day 3) and day 4 notes now posted. That’s the lot!
September 26, 2008 10:21 am
Published by Fran
Here are some articles on folksonomy that I found in a reading list on the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science website. Peterson, E. (2006). Beneath the metadata: some philosophical problems with folksonomy. D-Lib Magazine, 12(11). Vander Wal, T. (2007). Folksonomy coinage and definition. Quintarelli, E. (2005). Folksonomies: power to the people Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies: cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. Golder, S. A. & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32(2). 198-208.
September 25, 2008 10:26 am
Published by Fran
Creating User Centred Taxonomies is a handy article from the Free Pint FUMSI library. It’s a good detailed practical taxonomy guide, with an emphasis on the “charm offensive” needed to ensure user buy-in.
September 22, 2008 2:52 pm
Published by Fran
New method for building multilingual ontologies appeared on AlphaGalileo.Org – the Internet-based news centre for European science, engineering and technology. Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing (FIUPM) claim to have created a language-independent ontology-building tool. I think it will work very well for consistent well-structured information – for example in catalogues and directories – but it seems to me that it is essentially being an “auto-indexer” that only really works if you control linguistic forms, and perhaps even vocabulary, very tightly. That’s great – and means plenty of work for editors making sure everything is neat,... Read more »
September 11, 2008 3:17 pm
Published by Fran
Applying Turing’s Ideas to Search – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design applies the Turing test to the problem of understanding searches in order to provide better results. Ferrara suggests we need to revisit the parsing approach (moving on from the pattern-matching paradigm) and to develop “social ontologies” in order to get better search results. The “social ontologies” are – if I have understood correctly – wikis of relationships that can then be accessed by search engines to make semantic inferences. The ontologies would have to be socially constructed as there is just too much information out there... Read more »