10th ISKO international conference (day 2) notes now posted.
10th ISKO international conference (day 2) notes now posted.
I have now posted my notes on the pre-conference workshop on SKOS at the 10th ISKO international conference. I will post my notes on the conference itself, day by day, as I finish them.
Intranet 2.0: the need for ‘lean intranets’ « manIA has some sensible advice on keeping an Intranet efficient and functional. I was drawn to the section where Patrick Walsh discusses “controlled folksonomies”, a phrase he attributes to Christina Wodkte. Essentially, you let content contributors choose their own tags, but prompt them with suggestions. Presumably, people are far more likely just to use the existing tags (thus preserving the underlying controlled vocabulary) most of the time, because it is easier than making up their own. He implies that people could use terms not in the CV, but not what would become of those tags. If they get added to the CV automatically, you would lose the control element as mis-spellings and ambiguous terms etc would slowly creep in. To keep the CV tidy would require some ongoing editorial work. For one of the CMSs used at the BBC, there are rules – once a folksonomic tag has been used a certain number of times, it gets sent to the IA team who can then add it to the core CV if they think it will be useful. Presumably, you also need someone to produce an initial CV in the first place.
BCS IRSG – Search Solutions 2008 – a one-day conference in London, costing about £150. It looks like a good programme.
Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog: Metadata and Heraclitus. I’m always delighted to see any reference to early Greek philosophy and this one is very apt. Loprcan Dempsey suggests that we need to stop thinking of library collections as “lakes” – stable repositories fed by a few recognisable sources, and more like “rivers” in a constant state of flux. This affects the way we approach cataloguing and metadata and he gives some insightful examples.
Semantic wikis is a description of how semantic technology could be used to overcome retrieval problems in large-scale resources – in this case medical information. Once we start looking at DNA there is just so much data that we have to find clever ways of organising it. An excellent post from a fascinating and highly entertaining blog that ranges over many subjects.
The Cleverest Thing That Never Existed. The author – Charlie Hull – doesn’t hold out much hope for the semantic web! Dismissing semantic web technologies as marketing spin, he argues that existing search engines are already searching “semantically” (he is himself a producer of search technologies at Lemur) and can provide cheaper and easier KO solutions.
People Finder: Searching Without Logic? a step by step guide to improving findability in simple searches, by gathering errors and using them effectively as synonyms behind the search.
A Journey In Social Media: A Breakthrough In Taxonomy? A discusssion of the pros and cons of folksonomies and taxonomies, with the debate categorised as being between the traditionalists and the emergents. The writer is at a large company and promises updates on the taxo/folkso divide there.
The Taxonomy Guide – Bibliography is a collection of core taxonomy reference materials, compiled by the University of Toronto.