August 17, 2008 7:27 am
Published by Fran
I had a look at the new knol offering from Google and found this: Impact of Social Network Analysis Theory In Strengthening Diversity In Modern Organizations. There is no biography of the author, Osman Masahudu Gunu, but he is described as an accountant in the US and has contributed several knols. I was lucky enough to get myself introduced very briefly to Seth Earley at the Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy conference in March. He suggested I look into Social Network Theory in relation to taxonomies, as a knowledge organisation tool aimed at a specific group. This knol seemed like... Read more »
August 13, 2008 9:12 am
Published by Fran
I have just returned from the 10th International ISKO conference in Montreal, which was four days of excellent KO presentations. The pre-conference workshop was on SKOS and the conference itself included around 50 papers and a poster session. Some of my favourites were Knowledge and Trust in Epistemology and Social Software by Judith Simon, a Survey of the Top-level Categories in the Structure of Corporate Websites by Abdus Sattar Chaudhry, Deliberate Bias in Knowledge Organisation by Birger Hjorland, and Social Tagging and Communities of Practice by Edward Corrado and Heather Moulaison. I’ll be writing up my conference notes and posting... Read more »
August 2, 2008 8:57 am
Published by Fran
Unit Structures: Information Budgets and Shared Cognition an interesting post about “Twitter overload”.
August 1, 2008 1:35 pm
Published by Fran
The Taxonomy Tango discusses a multi-taxonomy management method and tool invented by Mobile Content Networks. “People are just getting comfortable with their own taxonomies and now they are realizing the world is full of taxonomies”, MCN CTO Phyllis Reuther is quoted as saying. “MCN Query Broker and Taxonomy Engine enables MobileSearch.net to make real-time queries to any number of relevant content sources, return results from those sources, and then group, sort, and rank results according to advanced algorithms and partner rules”, according to the MCN website. It would be interesting to know more about the rules that power this. MCN... Read more »
July 30, 2008 7:23 am
Published by Fran
This fascinating video (with transcript and follow-up post) on Patrick Lambe’s excellent blog (Green Chameleon) has turned out to be something of a hit, generating quite a discussion. There’s far more in it than I can do justice to here, but I was struck by two core questions – what is the future for “knowledge management” as a field or practice in itself and what is the future for the phrase “knowledge management”? I think that “knowledge management” as a practice has always been important and always will be, but the name may well change again and again (I’m sure... Read more »
July 30, 2008 6:47 am
Published by Fran
A really interesting discussion about the differences between Chinese and American website design on Live From Beijing (via 290s). I particularly liked the comment “Let’s avoid the trap of explaining things with culture instead of explicit motivations.” It’s so hard to disentangle the multiple motivations and influences on user behaviour, but financial gain does seem to have a tendency to trump everything else!
July 29, 2008 6:19 am
Published by Fran
The ISKO UK event Sharing vocabularies on the web via simple knowledge organisaton system (SKOS) was another roaring success, with great speakers and a very high calibre audience. If you’ve been reading up on knowledge organisation and want your books signed by the authors, an ISKO meeting is the place to go! The SKOS event, on Monday 21st July, was very detailed and technical, but understandable enough for novices to the subject to appreciate, and a great way of getting a handle on some of the key concepts. The first speaker was Alistair Miles from the University of Oxford who... Read more »
July 20, 2008 10:27 am
Published by Fran
Folksonomies 2.0 is a blog article suggesting “faceted tags” are a way of modifying folksonomies so that they are more useful. Interesting idea – a sort of mid-way point between folksonomies and taxonomies.
July 15, 2008 4:17 pm
Published by Fran
Procedure in Taxonomy by Edward T. Schenk and John H. McMasters is a gem of a book, first published in 1936. I read the third edition (published in 1956 and only borrowed 22 times from the library since then – 4 of which were in 1957!). It is a set of instructions and style guides for zoological nomenclature, with additional guides, such as how to select a repository for the storage of type specimens. Its phenomenal precision and attention to detail are a testament to the level of scholarship involved in scientific taxonomy and a reminder of the hours of... Read more »
July 14, 2008 7:53 am
Published by Fran
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation by Donald Davidson contains a series of philosophical essays on linguistic topics. I am interested in the way that different people respond differently to the language used in taxonomies and so delved into this to try to get a handle on recent linguistic theory. Most of the essays are very technical but I found the essays on Conceptual Schemes and Communication and Convention quite useful. Davidson argues that it makes no sense to talk of completely mutually unintelligible conceptual schemes. We can only talk about schemes as being different because there are some areas of... Read more »