June 14, 2008 9:08 am
Published by Fran
Here’s a review of Essential Classification by Vanda Broughton, a core Library Studies textbook and very easy read. It’s a sound introduction to classification – very practical and really aimed at trainee librarians, but included enough background and theory to keep me interested, including some pointers to the biases in the big classification systems. I was also intrigued by the assertion that people find it easier to remember numbers, so numerical shelfmarks are generally more popular than those based on letters. I always thought it was easier to remember letters, because you can make them into little phrases, but perhaps... Read more »
June 10, 2008 1:29 pm
Published by Fran
ISKO UK – International Society for Knowledge Organization event on June 26th. Three eminent speakers Brian Vickery, Stephen Robertson and Ian Rowlands will address the issues that have dominated the information retrieval agenda since the 1950s, and still present challenges and opportunities for the future.
June 5, 2008 7:27 am
Published by Fran
Last night I went to the ERBI IT special interest group meeting on text mining. It was a real treat. Richard Kidd from the Royal Society of Chemistry opened by describing their award-winning Prospect project which applies semantic web technologies to primary research publishing. Essentially, along with the Sciborg project they have developed software to identify chemical entities using text mining and ontologies, which provides rich sources of links and metadata and helps their editors validate texts. There is a fantastic tool called OSCAR that can extract all sorts of information from chemistry texts. Taxonomies and ontologies plug in to... Read more »
May 31, 2008 4:39 pm
Published by Fran
Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool is a fabulous plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. It is a bibliography creator/reference manager. It doesn’t take long to download, and gives you a little icon on each page you visit. If you click on the icon, it stores a citation in Zotero. You can collect your links and add notes, and if you use sites with bibliographic information, like Amazon or library sites, it creates a bibliographic record for you. You can then export these in various formats. I was able to install it, go through the tour and demo, and put together this list... Read more »
May 24, 2008 4:28 am
Published by Fran
I am very much looking forward to the Tenth International ISKO Conference, which will be held in Montréal, Canada, on August 5-8, 2008. The theme of the conference is Culture and Identity in Knowledge Organisation and the keynote address will be delivered by Jonathan Furner, Associate Professor at UCLA: “Interrogating ‘identity’: A Philosophical Approach to an Enduring Issue in Knowledge Organization”. There is also a workshop session and the famous banquet (I’m glad I’m not doing the seating plan – how do you please everyone when you have to organise experts in organisation?) I’ve already highlighted The Role of Causality... Read more »
May 12, 2008 12:09 pm
Published by Fran
A tag counting experiment – one to add to the growing collection of investigations of folksonomies. The authors claim that over 60% of folksonomic tags are “factual” and therefore ripe for harvesting as metadata. They make no claims as to the accuracy of the tags, although they refer to a previous study that showed that folksonomic tags were more accurate than auto-tagging software. They chose a very specific field – CSS style sheets – but the number crunching is an impressive effort – they claim to have have checked them all! Some typos though.
May 1, 2008 6:33 am
Published by Fran
Taxonomies and thesauri: a list of references and resources for public sector applications is a bibliography compiled by Stella Dextre Clarke as an essential reading list for taxonomists working with UK government data. Plenty of reading material here, well organised (as one would expect!) into helpful categories.
April 26, 2008 1:51 pm
Published by Fran
JISC reports aimed at librarians and others involved in the education sector. There are some very useful guides to the current state of play of metadata standards relevant to digital librarians, Web 2.0, and XML.
April 20, 2008 1:24 pm
Published by Fran
Lots of gems in Sociolinguistics: the study of speakers’ choices by Florian Coulmas (2005; Cambridge University Press). A serious introduction to the field aimed at students, with discussion points and references at the end of each chapter, with plenty of pointers to further study. I am interested in how language choice affects taxonomy, in labels and names, and what we perceive to be “natural” or “obvious” categories. Linguistics is a huge area of study, and even ignoring everything other than sociolinguistics still leaves an awful lot to take on board, so this clear and straightforward text was very helpful as... Read more »
April 15, 2008 1:10 pm
Published by Fran
Simple Knowledge Organisation and the Semantic Web. This short paper is a concise introduction to SKOS and the Semantic Web, introducing the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).