Author Archives for Fran
January 22, 2012 12:37 pm
Published by Fran
Many people find it very difficult to understand why search within an organization can’t “just be like Google”. This is often because they haven’t thought about the differences between an organization and the Internet. Your organization is smaller than the Internet Search engines like Google work because they have access to big data. Google gets billions of searches to process, from billions of users. Even if your organization is a large one, it won’t have that many users either searching or contributing content, so it cannot number crunch on the same scale as Google. Your IT department is probably a... Read more »
December 4, 2011 11:37 am
Published by Fran
I recently attended a gem of an event at the British Computer Society. There were three top class speakers and great networking with interesting people afterwards. I am always a little concerned that I’m not “hard” IT enough for these events, but metadata and taxonomies are such a cross-domain topic I always end up in fascinating conversations. Why Information Professionals should care about Big Data There are huge skills shortages in Big Data, mainly on the understanding and interpretation side, rather than the IT angle. The feeling seemed to be that knowing how to build the machines to do the... Read more »
November 20, 2011 9:15 am
Published by Fran
Understanding how data mining works is going to become increasingly important. There is a huge gap in popular and even professional knowledge about what organisations can now do “under the surface” with our data. For a very clear and straightforward explanation of how social graphs work and why we should be paying attention read Data Ghosts in the Facebook Machine.
November 13, 2011 12:55 pm
Published by Fran
In the last two weeks I have attended three very different conferences, with DAM as the common thread. The first was Media Pro Expo, where I spoke on a panel with the DAM Foundation, alongside Mark Davey, Madi Solomon, and David Lipsey. The second was Createasphere‘s first European DAM conference, and the third (co-located with the Createasphere event) was the SPAR Europe Conference on 3D Imaging and Data Management for Engineering, Construction, Manufacturing, and Security. The contrast between Media Pro and SPAR, and their respective audiences, was striking, but so were the similarities of the problems they faced, such as... Read more »
October 9, 2011 2:01 pm
Published by Fran
People have started to talk about the death of the schedule, often in the context of complaining that broadcasters are ill-prepared for this inevitability and schedulers complaining that no-one appreciates their skills in placing programmes appropriately and in context. One example is “hammocking” – making sure that viewers receive a “varied diet” across an evening, perhaps placing the news between two lighthearted pop culture programmes. Meanwhile, the anti-schedulists point out that given the choice, some people will download and watch an entire series in one marathon session (people have “Torchwood weekends”), so that they don’t have to commit to being... Read more »
October 7, 2011 4:38 am
Published by Fran
This post is the last in a series about the UDC consortium international seminar in The Hague, 19-20 September, 2011 Joan S. Mitchell, OCLC (USA), and Marcia Lei Zeng, Kent State University (USA), supported by Maja Žumer, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), talked about extending models for controlled vocabularies to classification systems: modelling DDC with FRSAD, which led to interesting discussions about their concepts of “nomen” and “thema”. Along with my former colleague Andy Heather, now CTO at DODS Parliamentary Communications Ltd, I talked about our work on the data migration of classifications from a legacy database into new taxonomy management... Read more »
October 3, 2011 7:28 am
Published by Fran
Day two of the UDC consortium international seminar opened with two subject-specific talks – Wolfram Sperber described a classification of mathematics and Andrew Buxton showed how similar chemistry classification and ontologies are, using the ChEBI ontology. He also described the different ways classifications and ontologies could be used to support each other and about the lack of good graphical tools and visualisations to represent ontologies. Categories and relations: key elements of ontologies – Categorial Distinctions Roberto Poli, University of Trento (Italy) talked about the compliexisties of part-whole relationships. There are simple wholes, composed of a sum of their parts, but... Read more »
September 29, 2011 10:46 am
Published by Fran
This post is 4th in a series about the UDC consortium international seminar in The Hague, 19-20 September, 2011. Interoperability of knowledge organization systems with and through ontologies Daniel Kless from the University of Melbourne pointed out that problems with ontologies arise when combining them, as errors in combination can have disastrous effects on subsequent reasoning. A well-defined modelling method is needed to minimise this. Standards such as OWL and RDF do not address the problems of methodology or terminology control. Towards the integration of knowledge organization systems with the linked data cloud Vincenzo Maltese of the University of Trento,... Read more »
September 28, 2011 5:24 am
Published by Fran
This post is the third in a series about the UDC consortium international seminar in The Hague, 19-20 September, 2011. Approaches to providing context in knowledge representation structures Barbara Kwasnik, Syracuse University (USA), talked about ways that context can be used as a disambiguation tool, and described different kinds of contexts: warrant, scientific, educational, cultural, etc. However, interdisciplinary approaches can be difficult. It is easy to have different ontological commitments, but you need a mapping to know when and which bits need to work across domains. Ontologies will need updating as the world and world views shift and change, so... Read more »
September 27, 2011 5:24 am
Published by Fran
This post is the second in a series about the UDC consortium international seminar in The Hague, 19-20 September, 2011. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) as hubs in the Web of Data In a minor change of schedule, Thomas Baker from the DCMI talked about some of the practical issues with using Linked Data. Provenance data can be recorded as additional information but it is not standardised or an integral part of RDF and this is something that is a growing concern, receving attention from W3C. URI persistence and alignment remain concerns for data managment and governance. Aligning web vocabularies Guus... Read more »