January 9, 2011 8:04 am
Published by Fran
Linked Data in Libraries I stayed in the Linked Data track for Day 2 of the Online Information Conference, very much enjoying Karen Coyle‘s presentation on metadata standards – FRBR, FRSAR, FRAD, RDA – and Sarah Bartlett‘s enthusiasm for using Linked Data to throw open bibliographic data to the world so that fascinating connections can be made. She explained that while the physical sciences have been well mapped and a number of ontologies are available, far less work has been done in the humanities. She encouraged humanities researchers to extend RDF and develop it. In the world of literature, the... Read more »
January 1, 2011 8:16 am
Published by Fran
I was delighted to be asked to support the official review panel who are assessing submissions for the forthcoming ISKO UK conference. It promises to be an excellent conference and I have written about the review process for the ISKO UK blog.
December 15, 2010 2:07 pm
Published by Fran
Despite the recession, tube strikes, and snow, there was a fine collection of speakers, exhibitors, and delegates at a smaller than usual Online Information Conference and Exhibition this year. Librarians seem to be getting heavily into Linked Data, while the corporate sector is still mainly concerned with business intelligence and search. On day one I enjoyed the practical explanations of how Linked Data principles have been made to work at The Guardian, The Press Association, the Dutch Parliament, and the ALISS health project in Scotland. Linked Data tags are a form of metadata that can be used to automatically generate... Read more »
December 11, 2010 12:37 pm
Published by Fran
I went to a British Computer Society talk on Augmented Reality a few weeks ago. The BCS audience is typically highly technical, but the talks themselves are always accessible and entertaining. People often wonder why I am interested in augmented reality, because they assume it has nothing to do with information, but to me it is all about information. I would love to be able to serve up archive content to someone’s mobile phone using location data – a clip of a scene from an episode of their favourite programme that was filmed in that location, or an old news... Read more »
November 28, 2010 10:25 am
Published by Fran
I was delighted to be introduced by Mark Davey to Leala Abbott on Monday. Leala is a smart and accomplished digital asset management consultant from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and we were discussing how difficult it is to explain what we do. I told her about how I describe “the evolution of classification” to people and she asked me to write it up here. So, this is my first blog post “by commission”. word In the beginning there was the word, then words (and eventually sentences). list Then people realised words could be very useful when... Read more »
November 18, 2010 9:36 am
Published by Fran
I was delighted to read an excellent blog post by Dan Brickley about the value of opening up classifications. It is lovely to read something like this from a technical expert who understands the power of innovation and new technology, but who also recognises the value of the information contained in classifications.
November 15, 2010 2:42 pm
Published by Fran
The ISKO UK afternoon event Legal Know-How: Organization and Semantic Analysis took place on Wednesday 10 November 2010 at University College London. I wrote a review for the ISKO UK website.
November 3, 2010 3:21 pm
Published by Fran
Back in the summer, I was very lucky to meet Jonah Bossewitch (thanks Sam!) an inspiring social scientist, technical architect, software developer, metadatician, and futurologist. His article The Bionic Social Scientist is a call to arms for the social sciences to recognise that technological advances have led to a proliferation of data. This is assumed to be unequivocably good, but is also fuelling a shadow science of analysis that is using data but failing to challenge the underlying assumptions that went into collecting that data. As I learned from Bowker and Star, assumptions – even at the most basic stage... Read more »
October 14, 2010 1:37 pm
Published by Fran
I went to a Semantic Web meetup event on Tuesday where Mike Bennett of the EDM introduced an ontology for managing financial sector information that he has been developing. It is always reassuring to discover that people working in completely different industries are facing the same challenges. Handling multiple viewpoints and the need to keep provenance of terminology well defined and clear was a key theme, as terms like “equities” can mean very different things in different contexts. Mike defined his own “archetypes” and used an “upper ontology” to act as an umbrella to connect other ontologies. I was particularly... Read more »
October 8, 2010 10:30 am
Published by Fran
I was very flattered to be asked by Kate Simpson to write another article – For digital asset management, search is not enough – for the excellent resource FUMSI. The article sums up some of the latest DAM trends and technologies with the intention of demystifying some of the services that software vendors are offering. It owes much to Theresa Regli‘s excellent work as a “professional cynic”.