actkm: Knowledgebase – does what it says on the tin – a collection of articles, papers, etc on Knowledge Management. It seeems pretty scholarly. The introductory section looked particularly promising.
Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged. This article on the ReadWrite Web blog is about the new API (does anyone else pronounce this “appy”?) sent out into the world by Reuters. They are hoping it will encourage tagging of articles in a way they can then harvest. It sounds like it is fairly basic at the moment – it is only recognising a few bits and pieces like people and places. It would be interesting to see how well it does with people like Jack London and places like Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa). When I worked on a... Read more »
Bibliography by Taxonomy Strategies. A carefully constructed list of useful papers, books, and articles, most available on line, covering taxonomy, information architecture, metadata, knowledge management, etc. This lot will keep me busy over Easter!
The Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy Conference in London on March 10th was a first for event organisers Henry Stewart Events. They were told that the subject was “too niche” , “no-one would turn up”, and “noboby would be interested”. They were not dissuaded, and went ahead with what turned out to be a wonderfully content-rich and fact-dense day. I’ve written a summary of the conference which is available here. A host of big name speakers (Madi Solomon former Corporate Nomenclature Taxonomist of Walt Disney, Seth Earley of Earley & Associates, John Jordan of Siemens, Chris Sizemore and Silver Oliver... Read more »
Getting Started in Information Architecture for the Web contains some handy tips for novice information architects.
Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata is a well-written paper that outlines some key issues in the usefulness and functioning of folksonomies. It includes some interesting ideas about “feedback loops” that motivate social tagging, ideas for further research, and a set of useful links to other articles.
Taxonomy – some guidelines for effective design of taxonomies offers a few basic tips on taxonomy development. There are also links to how the Drupal CMS handles taxonomy.
I had a very interesting conversation with Vikram from infoMENTUM – The Enterprise Content Management Services team the other day. He has been working with complex taxonomies in large organisations for several years and was kind enough to pass on some very handy tricks of the trade. He is an advocate of relational taxonomies, particularly for global organisations who need to have one unified “corporate voice” but also need flexibility and localisation to serve the differing needs of particular regions and communities.
Library of Congress Photos on Flickr should be an interesting experiment in how well social tagging can sort out content. It meets the criteria of having a lot of content that is currently very hard to find, and comprehensive recall is not essential (if some photos remain unfindable despite the social tagging, it’s a shame but not a disaster). The Library presumably has decided it would rather have any tagging than none and is reluctant to spend money. It also has a high profile and most likely the good will of the experienced taggers of the Flickr community. I would... Read more »
A linguistic mapping experiment. This article from The Journal of Cognition and Culture describes how Olga Stepanova and John D. Coley devised two linguistics experiments to show that Russian and English terms for jealousy and envy are not equivalent. In English “jealous” covers both (broadly) being jealous of a relationship between other people and being “envious” of a quality or possession belonging to another person but Russians have two terms that are not interchangeable. English speakers were far more likely to rank descriptions of “jealousy” situations and “envy” situations as similar than Russian speakers were. Interestingly, Russians who had learned... Read more »