Metadata

Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web

"The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interaction among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content and made scalable by machine-readable data. Yet there is a popular misconception that the two worlds are alternative, opposing ideologies about how the web ought to be. Folksonomy vs. ontology. Practical vs. formalistic. Humans vs. machines. This is nonsense, and it is time to embrace a unified view. I subscribe to the vision of the Semantic Web as a substrate for collective intelligence. The best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes is large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the 'people power' of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web. In this presentation I will show several ways that this can be, and is, happening." (Tom Gruber)

Posted on April 14, 2008 | Permalink

Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now

"In an hour long interview posted today about the Semantic Web, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are in place to move full steam ahead and realize the potential of a world of structured, machine readable data. Available as a part of the Talking with Talis semantic web podcast series, the interview (...) is summarized on interviewer Paul Miller's new ZDNet blog dedicated to the semantic web." (ReadWriteWeb)

Posted on February 28, 2008 | Permalink

Better Living Through Taxonomies

"Large websites and intranets can benefit from improved methods of search and navigation. These include site maps, A-Z indexes, sophisticated search engines, and generally improved navigational design—and playing a potential role in all of these methods is well-planned taxonomy." (Heather Hedden - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on February 06, 2008 | Permalink

Folksonomies and Image Tagging: Seeing the Future?

"Folksonomies are one of today's hottest Internet trends. They are but one part of Web 2.0, which, in part, refers to the ability of Internet users to add, change and improve World Wide Web content. A folksonomy is created as users of a website add 'tags' (keywords) to describe items on a website. The users choose their own keywords; few or no restrictions are imposed on their choices. The terms are not chosen from a previously existing controlled vocabulary, a strict taxonomy or any other officially sanctioned method of bibliographic description." (Diane Neal - ASIS&T Bulletin Oct/Nov 2007)

Posted on October 09, 2007 | Permalink

Web Ontology and the Semantic Web

"(...) Tim Berners-Lee's design for the Semantic Web will enable automatic collection and correlation of various parts of information about an object, available at various different web resources. The Semantic Web will save the valuable time we spend on navigating from one web resource to another in order to obtain meaningful information on a particular object. We would be happy then on finding out, for example, our old friend's complete information on giving partial hints on the fly without the need of our manually visiting various related web pages! But wait, there's more." (Goutam Kumar Saha - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on September 04, 2007 | Permalink

The Tagging Growth Curve

"The apparently irregular growth and spread of tagging is simply example of the real nature of how innovations spread. Professional analysts and other meaning makers tend to draw smooth graphs to depict these things. But in reality, natural systems (and the tagging / technology landscape is a legitimate ecosystem) are noisy, cyclical, chaotic, complex, fuzzy, non-linear, and unpredictable. They only appear to follow smooth curves at a high level of abstraction, or a low level of resolution.” (Joe Lamantia - tagsonomy)

Posted on September 04, 2007 | Permalink

Is Tagging A Disruptive Innovation?

"For many reasons, tagging has not yet emerged - and may never emerge - as a category of technology investment and activity for businesses." (Joe Lamantia - tagsonomy)

Posted on July 25, 2007 | Permalink

(Not) Everything is Miscellaneous

"It's not that I disagree with David about the power and potential of user participation in the creation and organization of knowledge. But, I do believe that the old serves as foundation for and coexists with the new (...)" (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted on May 03, 2007 | Permalink

Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow

"David and Cory discuss the advantages and pitfalls of explicit and implicit metadata, tags and the rules governing the use and re-use of content in commerce and culture." (David Weinberger - Epicenter Wired)

Posted on May 02, 2007 | Permalink

Measuring the success of a classification system

"When working with government and large private organizations on complex information systems, project managers and business representatives often demand early-stage validation that the proposed classification system provides the user-friendly solution they are charged with delivering. They also require this validation in a format that will be engaging for senior business stakeholders." (Iain Barker - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 24, 2007 | Permalink

Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums

"Integrating digital content from libraries, archives and museums represents a persistent challenge. While the history of standards development is rife with examples of cross-community experimentation, in the end, libraries, archives and museums have developed parallel descriptive strategies for cataloguing the materials in their custody. Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community. In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic." (Mary W. Elings and Günter Waibel - First Monday 12.3)

Posted on March 14, 2007 | Permalink

Taxonomy Out of the Box

"Taxonomies - at least some of them - reveal the order of things. They increase knowledge by manifesting multifaceted relationships among things. In that light, tagging and folksonomies look like the vulgarizing of knowledge, and well-bred taxonomies turn up their perky noses at the ill-manner interlopers. But the new taxonomizing does more than increase knowledge. It reveals meaning." (David Weinberger - ASIS&T Bulletin Feb/Mar 2007) - courtesy of theiainstitute

Posted on March 02, 2007 | Permalink

When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing

"This is an extensive post, revealing the results of a statistical comparison between Amazon and LibraryThing tags, and exploring why tagging has turned out relatively poorly for Amazon. I end by making concrete recommendations for ecommerce sites interested in making tagging work." (Thingology - LibraryThing) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on February 26, 2007 | Permalink

Pew Internet Report on Tagging

"Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content. The report features an interview with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society." (Pew Internet & American Life Project) - courtesy of tagsonomy

Posted on February 01, 2007 | Permalink

Folksonomy as symbol

"I think folksonomies have excited us because of what they say. They are symbols. But of what?" (David Weinberger)

Posted on December 19, 2006 | Permalink

W3C Semantic Web Activity

"The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar? Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself. The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing." (W3C)

Posted on December 12, 2006 | Permalink

Democratic folksonomy: in response to 'Beneath the Metadata'

"Metadata systems retain their integrity through control over what terms are used to describe the things that they refer to. It wouldn't help anyone if what was generally accepted as a car is referred to as an 'angular-wheely-thing' just because one person chooses to call it this, freely adding it to the folksonomy." (Kevin Shoesmith - Venn Communications Systems)

Posted on December 08, 2006 | Permalink

Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy

"People have been trying to classify and organize information for thousands of years. There are many examples of cataloged items in ancient repositories, including items in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Taxonomy arose as an attempt to organize information about plants and animals in the physical world, and Aristotle is often considered the father of classification or taxonomy. In his Categories, he names Substances (nouns) and determines the nine distinctive things that can be said about a particular thing. How we ultimately name something reflects the category to which we assign it. Through the development of categories, one is trying to answer the question, 'What is it?' Taxonomic methodology has also become important in mathematical set theory through discussions of set, class, aggregate, and collection. Neo-Aristotelian realists are as interested today in taxonomy as they are in ontology. Accurate classification is important in most, if not all, disciplines. In today's networked world of digital information, classification has become very important. One gathers, collects, and shares resources, making the organization of databases and websites crucial. Items that are different or strange can become a barrier to networking. Therefore, with the advent of the Internet, structure and consistency of classification or indexing schemes has taken on a new relevancy." (Elaine Peterson - D-Lib Magazine November 2006) / Replies by Thomas vanderWal and David Weinberger - courtesy of thomasvanderwal

Posted on November 20, 2006 | Permalink

The Web before the Web

"In September 2004 I was a guest-blogger for the French online magazine fluctuat.net. I wrote a series of short posts about what could be called 'the precursors of the Web' - or 'the Web minus the technology' (...). Here is an augmented and updated version in English that will be published in the magazine for art and new media aminima N°20. Some of my pieces are described as well, in relation to these precursors." (Christophe Bruno) - courtesy of brucesterling

Posted on November 01, 2006 | Permalink

Changing Approaches to Metadata at bbc.co.uk: From Chaos to Control and Then Letting Go Again

"More and more we expect to break the back of the work with automation while using human brainpower to perfect the results. We will have to harness the power of folksonomies while remembering there is stuff our audience will demand we know about our own content. Most of all, we have to ensure our choices of metadata systems are made with the user in mind." (Karen Loasby - ASIS&T Bulletin Oct/Nov 2006)

Posted on October 06, 2006 | Permalink

Understanding Folksonomy: Tagging that Works

"(...) presentation from d.construct. I have been presenting the content in this for nearly 2 years and have been iterating it. I have been wanting to get the Folksonomy Triad out in public as it has been getting really strong response in the 18 months that I have been using it." (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on September 24, 2006 | Permalink

On Arranging Books by Color

"(...) organizing his books by color allows him to discover new and unexpected relationships between books he knows well already. When two unrelated books are forced to occupy the same shelf simply because of their spine color, the shelver is asked to think about whether they have ideas to share between them. Perhaps, the designers of these chromatically-related books saw something in the books' content that even their authors did not. Maybe their ideals share a common hue?" (Rob Giampietro - Design Observer)

Posted on August 28, 2006 | Permalink

What is RDF?

"The SemWeb enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. Take an analogy: the current web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations, while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the W3C standard for encoding knowledge." (Joshua Tauberer - O'Reilly XML.com)

Posted on July 28, 2006 | Permalink

The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web

"This entry should be regarded as constructive criticism of the Semantic Web - I still believe in it, but need to bring the flaws (as I see them) in to the open, in the hope that discussion and communication is the first step towards resolving problems." (Dan Zambonini - O'Reilly XML.com)

Posted on July 28, 2006 | Permalink

Approaches to classification in publishing and knowledge management

"Classification of knowledge, and of the objects which contain it such as books and journals, has a long history, but is also a hot topic in the modern world of electronic collections and the World Wide Web. Indeed Tim Berners-Lee argues that the building of ontologies and software agents that can deal with them is central to the vision of the Semantic Web." (Electronic Publishing Specialist Forum)

Posted on July 18, 2006 | Permalink

Faceted Metadata for Information Architecture and Search

"The course, while originating in an academic environment, acknowledged the needs of practitioners by showing us how faceted metadata provides a solution that answers real users’ information-foraging problems and demonstrated two real-world applications of this solution..." (Jessyca Frederick - UXmatters)

Posted on July 02, 2006 | Permalink

Microformats gets a push, or is it a pull?

"(...) we need more metadata. Metadata lets us surf the information tsunami. Microformats are highly useful, but they won't be adopted unless there are apps that make use of them." (David Weinberger - Joho The Blog)

Posted on June 02, 2006 | Permalink

Collaborative Tagging Workshop @W3'06 Papers

"Collaborative tagging seems to address a real need on the Web as demonstrated by the growing popularity of tagging and annotation sites (see del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, RawSugar, Shadows, etc.). The most popular sites already have a combined user base of several millions. The philosophy of what is called Web 2.0, the social Web or also the two-way Web is that users can and should be content creators as well as consumers and it suggests that there is a great deal of untapped potential for tagging to improve how web content is organized, navigated and experienced. Yet it is not yet clear how it will evolve and how it will scale, when, if at all, its usage base will go beyond early adopters. The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together in order to explore both the social and technical issues and challenges involved in Web tagging. We plan to address not only the current state of collaborative tagging, and understand its attractiveness to early adopters but also discuss its future." (W3 Tagging Workshop)

Posted on May 25, 2006 | Permalink

Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging

"Today's 'hot topic' is collaborative tagging: the classification of items using free-text tags, unconstrained and arbitrary values. Tagging services are separated into two general classifications: 'broad', meaning that many different users can tag a single resource, or 'narrow', meaning that a resource is tagged by only one or a few users." (Emma Tonkin - Ariadne Issue 47) - courtesy of libraryclips

Posted on May 04, 2006 | Permalink

Defining 'Taxonomy'

"There are three basic characteristics of a taxonomy for knowledge management, and to be any good at its job, it needs to fulfil all three functions: 1. A taxonomy is a form of classification scheme. 2. Taxonomies are semantic. 3. A taxonomy is a kind of knowledge map." (Patrick Lambe - Green Chameleon) - courtesy of columntwo

Posted on April 23, 2006 | Permalink

Talking about Tagging

"Seems that not a day goes by without one of my projects discussing tags. As a result, I’ve been keeping with up with the broader conversation about tagging. Here’s what I've heard discussed recently." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on April 13, 2006 | Permalink

The 'Come To Me' Web

"Structured content, micro-formats, ambient findability, the model of attraction, and feeds let me (more closely) do what I want, when I want, how I want. They let me manage how I fulfill my desires; how I accomplish my goals." - Conversation with the people involved included. (Austin Govella - Thinking and Making) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted on April 06, 2006 | Permalink

The Name Game

"Tagging offers a potentially powerful way for a company to organize information by making fresh content immediately searchable, letting users designate terms that make sense to them and providing users with a sense of ownership. This ability for tags to provide so much content-describing power for ordinary folks has given rise to the term 'folksonomy', as opposed to the more restrictive sounding 'taxonomy'." (Michael Fitzgerald - CIO Magazine) - courtesy of keithinstone

Posted on April 04, 2006 | Permalink

The New Shape of Knowledge: From Trees to Piles of Leaves

"The digital revolution is enabling knowledge to slip the bonds of the physical which had, silently, shaped it. Now we get to see its 'natural' shape. What does it look like? How big are topics when they aren't determined by the economics of paper? Who gets to organize it? What are the new principles we're using to organize it? David Weinberger proposes that in the digital world, the most 'natural', efficient and responsive way to manage knowledge is to create huge, distributed piles of leaves, each tagged with as much metadata as possible - including treating the content as metadata - and postponing until the last minute the taxonomizing of the information. What will be the social effects as we move from trees to piles of leaves?" (David Weinberger - Oxford Internet Institute Webcasts)

Posted on March 31, 2006 | Permalink

What Are Personomies?

"Personomies are digital manifestations of an individual. Personomies combine identity (who you are), activity (what you do) and sociality (who you know). They include emails, contacts, blog posts, comments, purchases, page views, forms filled, bookmarks, ads clicked, chats, feeds subscribed and more. All these bits of data that can be tracked back to me belong in my personomy." (Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski - Personomies) - courtesy of boingboing

Posted on March 26, 2006 | Permalink

Tagging 2.0 at South By

"It's more interesting to find a like mind than just a resource." (Christian Crumlish - tagsonomy)

Posted on March 13, 2006 | Permalink

Second Generation Tag Clouds

"To date, tag clouds have been applied to just a few kinds of focuses (links, photos, albums, blog posts are the more recognizable). In the future, expect to see specialized tag cloud implementations emerge for a tremendous variety of semantic fields and focuses: celebrities, cars, properties or homes for sale, hotels and travel destinations, products, sports teams, media of all types, political campaigns, financial markets, brands, etc." (Joe Lamantia) - courtesy of columntwo

Posted on February 24, 2006 | Permalink

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?

"In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of 'sloppy tags', a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this 'tidying up' approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular." (Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin - DLib Magazine 12.1)

Posted on January 17, 2006 | Permalink

Online Information Folksonomy Presentation

"The main focus of this presentation is not that folksonomies should be seen as a replacement to taxonomy, but as a means to augment taxonomies (if there is one in place). As was resoundingly echoed by others on the panel, taxonomies are hard work and expensive to build and maintain. The cost and effort are often reasons why taxonomies are not exhaustive nor emergent, as budgets and time constraints provide limits. Most often we follow the Pareto Principle (also know as the 80/20 rule) where we focus on 80 percent of the use with 20 percent of the resources (in reality we aim toward something more like a 90/40 rule), but we do have limitations. Taxonomies are also authoritative, but this is problematic for the people who have a vocabulary that is different than the authoritative vocabulary(or more correctly vocabularies). This means a taxonomy will most often have a limited view, which is not a reason to stop taxonomies, but a reason to augment them." (Thomas Vander Wal - Personal InfoCloud)

Posted on January 17, 2006 | Permalink

Classification and categorization: A difference that makes a difference

"Examination of the systemic properties and forms of interaction that characterize classification and categorization reveals fundamental syntactic differences between the structure of classification systems and the structure of categorization systems. These distinctions lead to meaningful differences in the contexts within which information can be apprehended and influence the semantic information available to the individual. Structural and semantic differences between classification and categorization are differences that make a difference in the information environment by influencing the functional activities of an information system and by contributing to its constitution as an information environment." (Elin K. Jacob) - courtesy of vuk

Posted on December 28, 2005 | Permalink

The Year in Tags

"2005 has proven that tags are both big (in the financial sense) and useful. Whether or not tagging is a game-changer will, I think, depend on what Yahoo, Amazon and Google do with tags in 2006. But with three big players in the tagging game there's a lot of opporunity for innovation." (Gene Smith - Tagsonomy)

Posted on December 27, 2005 | Permalink

Tagging gives Web a human meaning

"If you've been to a technology event recently, especially one with a high concentration of digerati, you may have seen someone stand up and tell everyone what the event's Flickr tag is." - (Daniel Terdiman - C|Net)

Posted on November 18, 2005 | Permalink

The Memetic Web

"The memetic web uses meme IDs from a set of memespace taxonomies to tag web page content. Meme tags greatly improve the precision and recall of search engines. The memography wiki establishes a new social classification system. It provides taxonomies and pages that describe what each meme is about. Anyone can tag pages with memes from memography, or follow rules to create non-conflicting memes for corporate and personal use. Memelinks to aboutness pages are URIs that can be used as RDF properties for the semantic web." - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on November 04, 2005 | Permalink

Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia

"(...) I love Wikis and they are incredible tools, but one has to understand the boundaries. Wikis are emergent information tools and they are social tools. They are one of the best collaboration tools around, they even work very well for personal uses. But, like anything else it takes understanding on how to use them and use the information in them." (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on November 04, 2005 | Permalink

A cognitive analysis of tagging

"(...) the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability." (Rashmi Sinha)

Posted on September 28, 2005 | Permalink

The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems

"Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper, we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge." (Scott Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman - Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs) - courtesy of vukcosic

Posted on September 13, 2005 | Permalink

Cognatrix

"(...) a native Mac OS X ('Cocoa/Aqua') application for thesaurus construction." (LGOSystems) - courtesy of theotherblog

Posted on August 30, 2005 | Permalink

Web 2.0: Data, Metadata and Interface

"One key takeaway from the Web 2.0 panel was that data, interface and metadata no longer need to go hand in hand. When working on an application/website, one thinks of the overall picture including the data, the metadata, and the interface. With Web 2.0 apps, the data might be from one place, the metadata from another, and the interface from a third party or a remix. The diagram below shows the move towards Web 2.0 along with examples." (Rashmi Sinha)

Posted on August 14, 2005 | Permalink

Designing for the Personal InfoCloud

"Presented to Vera Rhoads User Interaction with Information Systems class in the Master of Information Managment program at University of Maryland. This was presented to the class on July 26, 2005 and included elements from previous folksonomy presentations." (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on August 01, 2005 | Permalink

Hierarchy versus Facets versus Tags

"Because hierarchies has been the designated one size fits all solution to all our organizational needs, we break our semantically pure hierarchies by overstretching their bounds. As a result, we end up with messy hierarchies that are unusable and unmaintainable." (OSAF Projects wiki)

Posted on August 01, 2005 | Permalink

fac.etio.us

"(...) faceted navigation of del.icio.us feeds. An experimental service." (Siderean Software) - courtesy of marcel van mackelenbergh

Posted on July 20, 2005 | Permalink

Tagging for Fun and Finding

"We all grew up knowing about tags. We had tags in our clothes, we had them on our holiday presents, we played a game called tag, and some even used spray cans to tag their turf. All of these uses of tag have different meanings, but unless we understand the context and/or the person using the word tag we do not know what they mean. This can be a problem with tagging on the web, but like everything else there are two sides to the story and there are some great benefits from tagging, if it is done well." (Thomas Vander Wal - OK/Cancel)

Posted on July 03, 2005 | Permalink

Folksonomies: Power to the people

"We have gone past a critical mass of connectivity between people that has introduced a new revolutionary ability to communicate, collaborate and share goods online." (Emanuele Quintarelli - ISKOI) - courtesy of langemarkscafe

Posted on June 26, 2005 | Permalink

The Meta Data Support Model: Part 1/Part 2

"Knowledge management, information architecture, content management, search engine technology and portalization are just a few of the evolutionary benefits of implementing meta data at the enterprise level. The meta data product line serves as the foundation from which processes and services can be built." (Metadata Portal) - courtesy of columntwo

Posted on June 22, 2005 | Permalink

Faceted Classification

Overview of relevant links by del.icio.us according to Michael Scudder (del.icio.us) - courtesy of marcel van mackelenbergh

Posted on June 09, 2005 | Permalink

How to combine tags with facets

"The big advantage of adding metadata in the form of facets is that we know how to make an easy to use interface for facets." (Peter van Dijck)

Posted on June 05, 2005 | Permalink

Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves

"The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree's branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge." (David Weinberger - JOHO)

Posted on May 22, 2005 | Permalink

Connotea Beta

"(...) a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user's links are visible both to visitors and to every other user, and different users' libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks." (About Connotea)

Posted on May 18, 2005 | Permalink

Social Bookmarking Tools (I)/(II)

"This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things going on here: 1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and 2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links." (Tony Hammond et al. - D-Lib Magazine April 2005)

Posted on May 17, 2005 | Permalink

The Future of Indexing?

"A recent article in the Society for Technical Communications' Intercom magazine proclaimed that indexing is on the rise (Seth Maislin, "The Indexing Revival," February, 2005), and that there is a renaissance of work in the field. But at the WritersUA March Conference, Microsoft's Longhorn features session declared that Longhorn's Help system will not contain an index, because 'no one uses it'. Then, to add to the discussion, at that same conference Apple revealed that their next help engine will include synonym rings and will add a form of indexing back into their display. Who's right? Who's correctly predicting the trends?" (Jan Wright - WinWriters UA) - courtesy of usablehelp

Posted on May 17, 2005 | Permalink

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

"Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies." (Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet)

Posted on May 16, 2005 | Permalink

Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies

"We benefit from folksonomies as the both the personal vocabulary and the social aspects help people to find and retain a tether to objects on the web that are an interest to them. Who is doing the tagging is important to understand and how the tags are consumed is an important factor." (Thomas Vanderwal - Personal InfoCloud)

Posted on May 16, 2005 | Permalink

Web 2.0 for Designers

"Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into 'microcontent' units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we're looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways." (Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on May 05, 2005 | Permalink

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

"One of the most promising features of folksonomies is that there is no disconnect between the user's words and the words on the site: the users words are the words on the site!" (Joshua Porter - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on April 27, 2005 | Permalink

Social Bookmarking Tools (I)

"We are here going to remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing. Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libraries – allows for rich, social networking opportunities." (Tony Hammond - D-Lib Magazine) - courtesy of lucdesk

Posted on April 21, 2005 | Permalink

The Semantic Web Community Portal (beta)

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database. - Tim Berners-Lee 1999" (Labs SemWeb)

Posted on April 17, 2005 | Permalink

Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories

"In the quest to organize the Web's information, an emerging approach is putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users." (Matt Hicks - eWeek) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on March 18, 2005 | Permalink

IA Summit Folksonomies Panel

"I thought the panel went well overall. Enough friction to keep the discussion interesting, smart presentations from the panelists, and good questions from the audience helped keep things rolling." (Gene Smith - Atomiq)

Posted on March 11, 2005 | Permalink

mSpace: Exploring the New Web

"mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person's interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues." (M.C. Schraefel) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on March 08, 2005 | Permalink

Visualizing Shared Metadata: The Tag Landscape

"While some continue to debate the usefulness of tag-based folksonomies, others are starting to build abstraction layers on top of a growing body of user-tagged data." - (The Social Software Weblog) - courtesy of langemarks cafe

Posted on March 03, 2005 | Permalink

Folksonomies Tap People Power

"(...) as more people understand what tags are, how they work and why they're important, the number of participants in folksonomies has grown." (Daniel Terdiman - Wired)

Posted on February 01, 2005 | Permalink

Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization

A Presentation to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - "As of early 2002, there were just over two billion web pages listed in the Google search engine index, widely taken to be the most comprehensive. No one knows how many more web pages there are on the Internet, or the total number of documents available over the public network, but there is no question that the number is enormous and growing quickly. Every one of those web pages has come into existence within the past ten years. There are web sites covering every conceivable topic at every level of detail and expertise, and information ranging from numerical tables to personal diaries to public discussions. Never before have so many people had access to so much diverse information." (Clara Yu et al. - US National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education) - courtesy of frank cronk

Posted on January 27, 2005 | Permalink

Formal Taxonomies for the U.S. Government

"For federal agencies trying to learn how to implement taxonomies, most examples in portals and on public websites are informal taxonomies where neither the nodes nor the associations between them are formally defined. Examples of such taxonomies can be found on yahoo.com, froogle.com, and dmoz.org. Such informal taxonomies are only useful for browsing and not for automated techniques like query expansion, rule execution, taxonomy integration, faceted classification, and inference. This article will examine the requirements of formal taxonomies and provide examples of each construct." (Michael Daconta - xml.com)

Posted on January 27, 2005 | Permalink

Taxonomies and classification schemas within the BBC

Martin Belam presentation at IP Lezing in Amsterdam - "The conference was very well attended, with around 350 delegates - and I enjoyed meeting some really nice people, both before and after the event. The presentation is available to download - PowerPoint presentation, 3.8M - but it is a very large file. As usual much of the worth is in the notes, not the pictures in the slides themselves." (Martin Belam - currybetdotnet)

Posted on January 26, 2005 | Permalink

What Do Tags Mean?

"I'm almost convinced that this new Technorati Tags thing is important, but I'm 100% convinced that I don't understand where it's going or what the implications are. Which is OK, because I suspect nobody else does either. (...) I've spent a lot of time thinking about metadata and have written on the subject; the most important conclusion was: There is no cheap metadata. I haven’t seen anything to make me change my mind." (Tim Bray - ongoing)

Posted on January 20, 2005 | Permalink

Understanding Taxonomies & Search for Corporate Applications

"The content management software industry has discovered that promoting taxonomy delivers significant visibility. It has the desired effect of letting the market know that a vendor is a serious player in the content management market, while also driving prospects to their consulting practices. Taxonomy is one of those words that is so bandied about that everyone is sure to feel the need for one – whatever it is, whatever it does. Like many good ideas, useful business tools, or enabling components, taxonomy, when affiliated with a product, is given impossible hype." (Lynda Moulton - Gilbane Reports) - courtesy of columntwo

Posted on January 11, 2005 | Permalink

Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?

"(...) though I'm not certain that the product of folksonomy development will have much long term value on their own, I'll bet dollars to donuts that the process of introducing a broader public to the act of developing and applying metadata will be incredibly invaluable." (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted on January 07, 2005 | Permalink

Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

"This paper examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies. The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web. The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge. A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well - often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception. This paper examines a third approach: user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community." (Adam Mathes - Graduate School of LIS, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) - courtesy of joe tennis

Posted on January 02, 2005 | Permalink

Semantic Learning Webs

"If current research is successful there will be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation." (Knowledge Management Institute Reports)

Posted on December 27, 2004 | Permalink

Search Smarter, Not Harder

"Databases and search engines provide instantaneous access to endless information about anyone or anything, but the search results often include as many misses as hits. To generate more-relevant answers, organizations including the federal government are using topic maps to index their data." (Wired) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on December 01, 2004 | Permalink

The Knowledge-Model Driven Enterprise

"(...) carefully developed metadata provides the foundation for a knowledge-model driven enterprise, representing an enormous opportunity for information architects - a chance to extend their talents to enterprise-wide concerns that go well beyond website design." (Andy Schriever - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 23, 2004 | Permalink

Metadata and XML: Improving the Findability of Information 

"The proliferation of the XML standard wihin the Technical Communication community of practice is gaining momentum. Many documents are produced on the basis of this markup language. The findability of these documents can be enhanced with the application of metadata. Applying metadata creates new possiblities to improve XML-documents. Concepts and techniques like (faceted) classification, thesauri, taxonomies, and topic maps can all be based on XML. This presentation outlines various metadata applications for XML-documents and identifies the added value of metadata for large document spaces." (Peter J. Bogaards - Tekom European Information Development Conference 2004) - select 'Downloads'

Posted on November 17, 2004 | Permalink

Topic Maps: The Inventor's Perspective on Subject-based Access

"Starting in 1992, Michel Biezunski and Steven R. Newcomb created, named, standardized and pioneered the application of the Topic Maps paradigm. Biezunski and Newcomb serve as co-editors of the ISO 13250 Topic Maps standard. They also co-founded TopicMaps.Org, where they co-edited the XML syntax (the 'XTM Specification') that was added to the 2002 version of the standard." (Luminary Lectures - Library of Congress) - courtesy of peter van dijck

Posted on November 11, 2004 | Permalink

Semantic World: The Data Semantics Community

"Semantic World is a web community dedicated to the use of semantic information management methods in industry. Semantic World will include relevant news and analysis, a comprehensive resource center, and interactive forums for practitioners of semantic methodologies to share experiences, problems, and initiatives. Semantic World aims to support and influence developing standards for ontology modeling, semantic mapping, and the use of semantic information management methods in IT." (About Semantic World) - courtesy of gunnar langemark

Posted on November 01, 2004 | Permalink

Why categorize?

"The human brain is a wonderful information processor. We take in innumerable details with every glance, sound or touch. Yet we are seldom overwhelmed with the magnitude of the information we are processing. One reason that we are able to cope with so much input is that we categorize it all. We look for what is new, what is different, what has changed. Then we try to match the new information to the categories that already exist in our minds." - (Susan Feldman - KMWorld Magazine) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on October 28, 2004 | Permalink

Metadata for the Masses

"Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on October 20, 2004 | Permalink

Gnowsis

"(...) the Semantic Desktop environment published by the Knowledge Management Lab of the DFKI. Gnowsis can be used in research projects or by interested individuals to benefit from Semantic Web technologies." (DFKI Knowledge Management Lab) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on October 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

What is a document?

"Ordinarily the word 'document' denotes a textual record. Increasingly sophisticated attempts to provide access to the rapidly growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which should be considered a 'document'. The answer is important for any definition of the scope of Information Science. Paul Otlet and others developed a functional view of 'document' and discussed whether, for example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be considered 'documents'. (...) New digital technology renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted on September 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Experiences of Educators Using a Portal of Aggregated Metadata

"The paper documents a pilot user test with a small group of K-12 teachers-in-training. The users were asked to use the portal to locate primary source materials for use in the classroom. The results highlight the challenges posed by aggregations of heterogeneous metadata for both users and service providers. Areas for further investigation and approaches for more in-depth studies are suggested." (Sarah L. Shreeves and Christine M. Kirkham - Journal of Digital Information 5.3)

Posted on September 14, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Use of Faceted Classification

"Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension." (Heidi P. Adkisson - Web Design Practices) - courtesy of reloade

Posted on September 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

"If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities." (Cory Doctorow)

Posted on September 07, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Study: Facets on the web

"This is the project homepage for the preliminary study: 'Adventures in faceted classification: A brave new world or a world of confusion?' presented July, 2004 at ISKO in London, England." (Kathryn La Barre)

Posted on September 03, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Topic Map Design Patterns for Information Architecture

"This paper presents the arguments for developing and publishing topic map design patterns and a proposed notation for diagramming design patterns based on UML. Finally, by way of examples, the paper presents some design patterns for representation of traditional classification schemes such as thesauri, hierarchical and faceted classification." (techquila)

Posted on September 03, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

An Interdisciplinary Perspective of Classificatory Structures

"In this essay, I will examine the purposes served by classificatory structures and discuss how classifying information from an interdisciplinary perspective can be relevant, valuable, and useful." (Claire McInerney - SCILS Rutgers)

Posted on August 27, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Cognitive Cost of Classification

"The mental effort required to consistently assign keywords outweighs the benefits for most frontline contributors to content, document, and knowledge management systems. Contrary to this lovely summary, faceted classification can actually compound the problem. Facets are oversold in situations where info-civilians have to classify content that they have created themselves. Expecting facets to solve the metacrap problem is naive." (Jess McMullin - interactionary) - courtesy of victor lombardi

Posted on August 23, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Faceted Classification of Information

"Given the significant difficulties in categorizing books, papers, and articles using traditional library classification techniques, it would seem next to impossible for humans to classify the small chunks of rapidly changing information that characterize information-intensive business environments. But it's not. Library and information science professionals have already provided the foundations of an alternative to traditional classification techniques: faceted classification." (The Knowledge Management Connection) - courtesy of keith instone

Posted on August 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The corporate taxonomy: Creating a new order

"Taxonomies are an important tool in balancing the contradictory forces of information overload and the need for instant access to the right information." (Eric Woods - KMWorld) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on August 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Bad metadata is killing music

"(...) this is also about how generally incomplete the content object models that most digital music experiences are based around." (City of Sound)

Posted on August 11, 2004