KO

Social Network Analysis Theory

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I had a look at the new knol offering from Google and found this: Impact of Social Network Analysis Theory In Strengthening Diversity In Modern Organizations. There is no biography of the author, Osman Masahudu Gunu, but he is described as an accountant in the US and has contributed several knols.

I was lucky enough to get myself introduced very briefly to Seth Earley at the Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy conference in March. He suggested I look into Social Network Theory in relation to taxonomies, as a knowledge organisation tool aimed at a specific group. This knol seemed like a good bullet point introduction with some useful references.

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information architecture | KO

ISKO international 2008

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I have just returned from the 10th International ISKO conference in Montreal, which was four days of excellent KO presentations. The pre-conference workshop was on SKOS and the conference itself included around 50 papers and a poster session. Some of my favourites were Knowledge and Trust in Epistemology and Social Software by Judith Simon, a Survey of the Top-level Categories in the Structure of Corporate Websites by Abdus Sattar Chaudhry, Deliberate Bias in Knowledge Organisation by Birger Hjorland, and Social Tagging and Communities of Practice by Edward Corrado and Heather Moulaison.

I’ll be writing up my conference notes and posting them here over the weekend.

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semantic web

Taxonomies and the semantic web

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The Taxonomy Tango discusses a multi-taxonomy management method and tool invented by Mobile Content Networks. “People are just getting comfortable with their own taxonomies and now they are realizing the world is full of taxonomies”, MCN CTO Phyllis Reuther is quoted as saying.

“MCN Query Broker and Taxonomy Engine enables MobileSearch.net to make real-time queries to any number of relevant content sources, return results from those sources, and then group, sort, and rank results according to advanced algorithms and partner rules”, according to the MCN website.

It would be interesting to know more about the rules that power this. MCN provide some pretty diagrams, which say things like it classifies, it sorts, but only question marks where the “magic ” happens!

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information management

Dead KM Walking

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Estimated reading time 2–3 minutes

This fascinating video (with transcript and follow-up post) on Patrick Lambe’s excellent blog (Green Chameleon) has turned out to be something of a hit, generating quite a discussion.

There’s far more in it than I can do justice to here, but I was struck by two core questions – what is the future for “knowledge management” as a field or practice in itself and what is the future for the phrase “knowledge management”?

I think that “knowledge management” as a practice has always been important and always will be, but the name may well change again and again (I’m sure the basic idea has been referred to as all sorts of things in the past). The lifespan of names is getting shorter and shorter these days, driven by the need to appear innovative and cutting edge all the time. There is also a tension – as people become specialised – to distinguish themselves from each other. This happens in every discipline – biologist, zoologist, ornithologist, herpetologist, virologist, etc. What I am not so sure about is whether “information professional” is accepted and well enough understood as a catch-all, so that “knowledge managers”, “records managers”, “librarians”, “information architects”, “enterprise content managers” etc are all seen as cousins in the same family. I’m also not sure if what is going on at the moment with “knowledge management” is is a kind of vying for dominance of the different terms, so at one point it looked like “knowledge management” would be the one and only catch-all term (rather than “information professional”, “information scientist” etc) and that other terms are now rising to prominence. What I am convinced of, however, is that everybody needs to talk to each other as much as possible and not let names turn into silos. Just as in a taxonomy – the labels are supposed to be signposts, not barriers.

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information architecture

Cultural design misunderstandings

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A really interesting discussion about the differences between Chinese and American website design on Live From Beijing (via 290s). I particularly liked the comment “Let’s avoid the trap of explaining things with culture instead of explicit motivations.” It’s so hard to disentangle the multiple motivations and influences on user behaviour, but financial gain does seem to have a tendency to trump everything else!

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libraries and museums | semantic web

SKOS event

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

The ISKO UK event Sharing vocabularies on the web via simple knowledge organisaton system (SKOS) was another roaring success, with great speakers and a very high calibre audience. If you’ve been reading up on knowledge organisation and want your books signed by the authors, an ISKO meeting is the place to go! The SKOS event, on Monday 21st July, was very detailed and technical, but understandable enough for novices to the subject to appreciate, and a great way of getting a handle on some of the key concepts. The first speaker was Alistair Miles from the University of Oxford who is using SKOS to get biological research (specifically into fruit flies) onto the semantic web. His colleague Antoine Isaac talked about transforming exisiting knowledge organisation systems into a semantic web format. Stella Dextre Clarke, Leonard Will, and Nicolas Cochard talked about the new British Standard (BS8723) for thesaurus creation that they have been compiling. It is in the process of being turned into an ISO standard. They also explained its relationship to SKOS. Ceri Binding and Douglas Tudhope from the University of Glamorgan then described their STAR project for managing archaeological information using SKOS. Finally Bernard Vatant from Mondeca explained that you don’t have to choose between SKOS and OWL – you can use both.

The event ended with a panel session for questions and answers and then networking over wine and nibbles.

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libraries and museums

Procedure in Taxonomy

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Procedure in Taxonomy by Edward T. Schenk and John H. McMasters is a gem of a book, first published in 1936. I read the third edition (published in 1956 and only borrowed 22 times from the library since then – 4 of which were in 1957!). It is a set of instructions and style guides for zoological nomenclature, with additional guides, such as how to select a repository for the storage of type specimens. Its phenomenal precision and attention to detail are a testament to the level of scholarship involved in scientific taxonomy and a reminder of the hours of painstaking effort that went into creating the information-rich world we so easily take for granted today.

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linguistics

Truth and Interpretation

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation by Donald Davidson contains a series of philosophical essays on linguistic topics. I am interested in the way that different people respond differently to the language used in taxonomies and so delved into this to try to get a handle on recent linguistic theory. Most of the essays are very technical but I found the essays on Conceptual Schemes and Communication and Convention quite useful. Davidson argues that it makes no sense to talk of completely mutually unintelligible conceptual schemes. We can only talk about schemes as being different because there are some areas of mutual intelligibility and it is this common ground that enables us to highlight local differences.

In Communication and Convention, he argues that repetition and rules-based language conventions are helpful and usual practice in communication, but not necessary. We do not need to agree in advance a theory of interpretation before we start speaking to someone new, because we can develop this through the process of communication itself. However, it saves an awful lot of time if we just assume they understand language in the same way we do and most of the time they do. If they don’t we can modify our theory and try to establish a means of communication as we go along.

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