Reuters Wants the World To Be Tagged

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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 similar project we had lots of problems disambiguating the Guineas (Papua New, Equatorial, etc) and Salvadors (El or San) in particular. I assume they have lots of authority files backed up by rules that will sort all those out. It would be nice to see “under the bonnet” as it were!

Metadata and Taxonomy Conference

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

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 from the BBC were just a few) gave fascinating and insightful talks. There were also lots of software overviews which I found very helpful (including an assessment by Theresa Regli from CMS Watch) and as is always a real treat at these events the opportunity to meet lots of other taxonomists and information architects. The food was good too!

infoMENTUM

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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

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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 think it would also provide the librarians with a good starting point for organising their image metadata if they decide they want or need to do some more formal sorting out further on down the line. Definitely one to watch.

Are Russians and Americans equally jealous?

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Estimated reading time 2–2 minutes

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 English were less likely to note a clear distinction between the two terms than the monolingual Russians, suggesting that learning English had introduced some conceptual “blurring”.

Conceptual mapping strikes me as a subtle but important issue for taxonomists. It is obvious that mapping in multilingual environoments can be problematic, but presumably the conceptual “blurring” that bilingual people experience can happen within information domains in a single language. In other words, just knowing that other people use a term to mean something different opens up broader categorisation possibilities. Trivially, if you don’t know something has an alternative meaning you will only indicate one place for it in a taxonomy, but conversely knowing the alternative adds a layer of complication to work through. It’s an issue that seems obvious from practical work, but I am always reassured to see experiments supporting apparent common sense.