Metadata

Apples and oranges: Developing an enterprise taxonomy that works

So much to change in enterprises. How about metadata?

"The increasing need to dynamically deliver targeted content that is contextually relevant rests on three things – the technology to deliver it, the appropriate personalization and targeting strategies, and a robust enterprise taxonomy. Developing and managing your taxonomy is not a painless exercise, and it requires the help of an expert and the involvement and buy-in of key stakeholders, but based on our experiences, the benefits far outweigh the effort."

(SiteWorx)

Posted on May 16, 2013 | Permalink

Your taxonomy is broken

Taxo's are great tools for hierarchical thinking.

"The only answer that makes any sense when managing large amounts of content is – perhaps counter-intuitively – to use a flat structure, without a taxonomy."

(Rick Yagodich a.k.a. @ThinkInfo ~ Think Info)

Posted on May 07, 2013 | Permalink

Building User Experiences: Synchronizing User Experience Design and the Supporting Metadata and Taxonomy Infrastructure

Taxonomists focus on content organization. UX designers on content experience.

"Despite their best intentions, user experience designers and taxonomy and metadata developers have often found that their work is not well connected, even though both are highly interrelated. For example, a design might be proposed that needs segmentation of content by user role, but there may not be metadata associated with content that captures the role, resulting in the need for detailed review of content and hand coding to create the experience. Taxonomists might build a taxonomy for roles without knowing which roles the design uses, leading to over- or under-specification of the taxonomy."

(Carol A. Hert, Gary Carlson, and Bram Wessel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin, December 2012/January 2013)

Posted on December 10, 2012 | Permalink

Using social bookmarks and tags as alternative indicators of journal content description

From top-down to bottom-up.

"Qualitative journal evaluation cumulates content descriptions of single articles. Articles are either represented by author–generated keywords, professionally indexed subject headings, automatically extracted terms or, as recently introduced, by reader–generated tags as used in social bookmarking systems. The study presented here shows that different types of keywords each reflect a different perspective on documents and that tags can be used in journal evaluation to represent a reader–specific view. After providing a broad theoretical background and literature review, methods for extensive automatic term cleaning and calculation of term overlaps are introduced. The efficiency of tags and other metadata for journal content description is illustrated for one particular journal."

(Stefanie Haustein and Isabella Peters ~ First Monday, Volume 17, Number 11)

Posted on November 06, 2012 | Permalink

Taxonomy, Metadata, and Search

All the meta nodes in the conceptual layer explained.

Notes from Seth Earley's Confab Workshop ~ "(...) your table of contents, which somewhat expresses the hierarchy, order, and relationships within your information, helps the reader understand at a glance the whole of the information. Even if the user doesn't navigate his or her way through this sometimes maze-like TOC structure, not having the table of contents at all makes users uneasy. If you replace that table of contents with another sort of organization, something that doesn't express the semantic relationships of the information components, your users may feel lost."

(Tom Johnson ~ I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted on June 26, 2012 | Permalink

Enhancing user involvement with digital cultural heritage: The usage of social tagging and storytelling

Dutch museums enter the universe of metadata.

"This paper focuses on the use of online social tagging and storytelling to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. Together with several Dutch museums, we examined the question of whether and how social tagging could benefit these museums in disclosing specific digital collections. This led to the development of a social tagging tool as a means of researching behaviour when tagging cultural objects. The results show that tagging and storytelling can help museums enrich their collections and involve their audiences."

(Harry van Vliet and Erik Hekman ~ First Monday, Volume 17, Number 5)

Posted on May 08, 2012 | Permalink

Organizing digital information for others

The other is the most significant subject in your professional live.

"When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of "metadata", "controlled vocabulary" and "taxonomy" without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily."

(Maish Nichani a.k.a. @maish ~ PebbleRoad)

Posted on March 15, 2012 | Permalink

How Taxonomy and Metadata Leads to Findability

Taxos and metadata have been around for centuries. Locked in the paper technologies.

"Taxonomy and metadata are becoming much more popular these days. Companies need to keep track of their information, but can't use traditional classification systems, such as Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Subject Headings. In the last 10 years, faceted taxonomies have taken on new importance on the web; XML has upgraded the visibility of metadata. Having the skills to create taxonomies and metadata will serve you well. Most people don't have the instinctual skills to create information organization structures that are useful or the practical knowledge and experience to be confident in the structures they create. Understanding how taxonomies and metadata feed into user interfaces allows you to recommend good designs that improve findability."

(Theresa Putkey ~ E3 Content Strategy)

Posted on February 07, 2012 | Permalink

Introduction to Metadata: Online Edition, Version 3.0

Useful reference work from 2008.

"An online publication devoted to metadata, its types and uses, and how it can improve access to digital resources."

(Edited by Murtha Baca ~ Getty Museum)
courtesy of xanderroozen

Posted on January 18, 2012 | Permalink

Using Tags to Increase Findability

Tagging content, references or other BLOBs systematically is not for everybody an easy task. Most are just lazy.

"Although I've explored different strategies for findability, it seems that faceted classification through the attachment of metadata (such as tags) to resources remains the most compelling strategy. It can suit a diversity of audiences, purposes, and needs."

(Thom Johnson a.k.a. @tomjohnson ~ I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted on January 02, 2012 | Permalink

Taxonomy and Metadata and Findability Influence Traditional Roles

Some things are innate, others you have to learn. It's called Hard Fun.

"Taxonomy and metadata skills are now much more important library skills. A lot of information being created today does not fit into the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Subject Headings or many other classification systems. Companies struggle with how to organize digital information to ensure everyone can find it and many companies are starting to move away from file servers and into content management systems where taxonomy and metadata are crucial to categorizing and retrieving information. However, most people don't have the instinctual skills to create information organization structures that are useful or the practical knowledge and experience to be confident in the structures they create."

(Theresa Putkey ~ Key Pointe Usability Consulting)

Posted on October 19, 2011 | Permalink

Categories, Facets, and Browsable Facets?

In the old days, we called it Information Disclosure.

"(...) some facets are useful in fundamental decision making. These browsable facets should enable their selection in the absence - and instead - of a category, then once selected, intersect with other facets using the same category taxonomy the rest of the Web site uses. Some Web sites get this wrong by not allowing pivoting to categories at all. Others try to simulate this functionality by creating a separate category taxonomy for each brand - and they fail."

(Jaimie Sirovich a.k.a. @SEO_Egghead ~ UXmatters)

Posted on August 24, 2011 | Permalink

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search

"To design better search and discovery experiences we must understand the complexities of the human-information seeking process. Numerous theoretical frameworks have been proposed to characterize this complex process, notably the standard model, the cognitive model and the dynamic model. In addition, others have investigated search as a strategic process, examining the various problem solving strategies and tactics that information seekers employ over extended periods of time. In this paper, we examine the needs and behaviours of varied individuals across a range of search and discovery scenarios within various types of enterprise. These are based on an analysis of the scenarios derived from numerous engagements involving the development of search and business intelligence solutions utilizing the Endeca Latitude software platform. In so doing, we extend the classic IR concept of information-seeking to a broader notion of discovery-oriented problem solving, accommodating the much wider range of behaviours required to fulfil the typical goals and objectives of enterprise knowledge workers."

(Tony Russell-Rose a.k.a. @tonygrr ~ Information Interaction) - courtesy of jameskalbach

Posted on July 12, 2011 | Permalink

Using tag bundles in intranets

"It's common for enterprises to have a document library in their intranets that houses all types of administrative and operational content. Such a document library usually has a taxonomy to improve the discoverability and findability of content. However, there is one problem: documents need to get into the library first! Submitting a document to the library involves filing or tagging the document with the right taxonomic terms, a procedure that can make people see red if not done properly. Tag bundles can help simplify this procedure and also improve the use of such document libraries."

(Maish Nichani a.k.a. @maish ~ PebbleRoad)
courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on June 27, 2011 | Permalink

Information Overload, Reloaded

"Contemporary information architecture can help reframe how we approach this thing called information overload. In this article (...) Nathaniel Davis, founder and curator of DSIA Research Initiative and DSIA Portal of IA, leads the discussion on behalf of contemporary information architecture. He repositions information abundance and filter failure as signatures of information overload. Davis then suggests how information overload can be quantified as two unique conditions that are ideal for further investigation in theory, research and practice to better understand their influence on providing sound information architecture recommendations."

(Nathaniel Davis ~ DSIA Portal of IA)

Posted on June 07, 2011 | Permalink

Book Review: Everything is Miscellaneous

"Some of his philosophical interests surface more visibly here, but overall the book is extremely relevant to the field of technical communication. For anyone who has ever struggled to organize help content, this book provides solid answers and strategies." (Tom Johnson)

Posted on April 15, 2011 | Permalink

Idea Collider: From a Theory of Knowledge Organization to a Theory of Knowledge Interaction

"A new and novel addition to core concepts of information science and technology is the Idea Collider, adapting the conceptual basis of the particle accelerator. The Idea Collider is presented as a theory of information and an information retrieval tool that deconstructs text to the underlying elements - the concepts, ideas, knowledge entities, taxons and knowledge bases - and then reconstitutes groupings of data. The authors champion the idea of a 'multiverse of knowledge', in contrast to the 'universe of knowledge' that is an important metaphor in traditional classification theory. A historical review of outstanding theoretical landmarks in classification theory explores the universe of knowledge metaphor, faceted classification theory and the universe of concepts, moving from a holistic view of existing knowledge to an elemental deconstruction that can account for all knowledge, past and future. The Idea Collider is proposed as a theoretical approach to identifying the essential parts of knowledge, dissociating those elements from culture- and time-bound dimensions and making them available for a bottom-up reassembly process." (Richard P. Smiraglia and Charles van den Heuvel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin)

Posted on April 08, 2011 | Permalink

Emergent Semantics

"(...) a set of principles and techniques analyzing the evolution of decentralized semantic structures in large scale distributed information systems. Emergent semantics approaches model the semantics of a distributed system as an ensemble of relationships between syntactic structures. They consider both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities dependent on the proper interpretation of the symbols. This is a complex systems perspective on the problem of dealing with semantics." (Philippe Cudre-Mauroux ~ SOKS 2010)

Posted on March 15, 2011 | Permalink

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

"This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web. The paper is meant for both webmasters and information architects who do not know a lot about library and information science, and librarians who do not know a lot about building databases and web sites. The classifications are meant for small or medium-sized sets of things, meant to go on public or private web sites, when there is a need to organize items for which no existing classification will do. It is certainly not the intent of this paper to show how to build another universal classification, nor to describe how a library that uses a faceted classification scheme can put their catalogue online." (William Denton ~ Miskatonic University Press 2009)

Posted on February 24, 2011 | Permalink

to_be_classified

"This paper examines the use of the postulational approach to facet analysis to manually induce a faceted classification ontology from a folksonomy." (Elise Conradi ~ Journal of Information Architecture Volume 2 Issue 3)

Posted on January 31, 2011 | Permalink

Tagging Human Knowledge

"A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness. In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems." (Paul Heymann ~ Videolectures.net WSDM 2010)

Posted on January 11, 2011 | Permalink

An interview with Mike Kuniavsky

"And we never fully understand our technology. We may understand the technical aspect of it, but we never fully understand the social implications of it. Lots of people point out that every technology is a double-edged sword; for every positive thing that it does, there's a negative effect that it has. What we do is try to balance those. As designers, I think the role is to try to understand as much as possible about that, given the time, budget, and knowledge constraints that we have, in order to be able to make decisions to try to mitigate the negative aspects while amplifying the positive aspects of technology." (David Bevans ~ Morgan Kaufmann Publishers)

Posted on December 07, 2010 | Permalink

Edging Toward the Semantic Web: Protocols, Curation, and Seeds

"The evolution from an interactive Internet (often called Web 2.0) toward a more intelligent, semantic web will not happen as a result of dramatic new inventions or jointly agreed standards, but through a gradual evolution and recombination of existing technologies. To get to a Web 3.0, we will need to first create (and maybe be satisfied with) a Web 2.5, and that will happen through the gradual evolution of effective, user-based interaction protocols (based on user dialogues) and the use of queries as information passing mechanisms." (Espen Andersen ~ Ubiquity November 2010 issue)

Posted on November 30, 2010 | Permalink

Linked Data tools: Semantic Web for the masses

"Semantic Web technologies have immense potential to transform the Internet into a distributed reasoning machine that will not only execute extremely precise searches, but will also have the ability to analyze the data it finds to create new knowledge. This paper examines the state of Semantic Web (also known as Linked Data) tools and infrastructure to determine whether semantic technologies are sufficiently mature for non–expert use, and to identify some of the obstacles to global Linked Data implementation." (Lisa Goddard and Gillian Byrne ~ First Monday 15.11)

Posted on November 16, 2010 | Permalink

Qwiki: Introducing the information experience

"Qwiki's goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Whether you're planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family AppleTV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search. We are the first to turn information into an experience. We believe that just because data is stored by machines doesn’t mean it should be presented as a machine-readable list. Let's try harder." (About Qwiki) ~ Adding more machine power to the information overload

Posted on October 26, 2010 | Permalink

Index Pages: Unsuspected Project-Profitability Killers

"During an information architecture project, creating index pages for items within categories can result in a lot of unexpected work." (Nicola Rovetta ~ UXmatters)

Posted on October 04, 2010 | Permalink

Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die

"Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A–Z listings for presenting options to users." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted on October 03, 2010 | Permalink

Are you prepared for the Semantic Web?

"If you want to stay ahead of the web publishing curve, now is the time to start learning and experimenting with the Semantic Web. It’s been in development since the ’90s, led by Tim Berners-Lee himself. When media historians write books about the information transformation we are in (from print to web), the Semantic Web will be at least as important as the invention of HTML. Having Semantic Web-enabled pages will soon be a big competitive advantage for you and your company." (Writing for Digital)

Posted on July 20, 2010 | Permalink

Topic Maps: From Information to Discourse Architecture

"Topic Maps is a standards-based technology and model for organizing and integrating digital information in a range of applications and domains. Drawing on notions adapted from current discourse theory, this article focuses on the communicative, or explanatory, potential of topic maps. It is demonstrated that topic maps may be structured in ways that are 'text-like' in character and, therefore, conducive to more expository or discursive forms of machine-readable information architecture. More specifically, it is exemplified how a certain measure of 'texture', i.e. textual cohesion and coherence, may be built into topic maps. Further, it is argued that the capability to represent and organize discourse structure may prove useful, if not essential, in systems and services associated with the emerging Socio-Semantic Web. As an example, it is illustrated how topic maps may be put to use within an area such as distributed semantic micro-blogging." (Lars Johnsen ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3)

Posted on July 01, 2010 | Permalink

Taxonomy: A 'Disambiguation'

"Taxonomy is an ancient scientific practice. It means to find names for things. In naming things, you try to figure out how sets of things are related to one another, so that each, unique item will not only have a unique name, but also a reference to the others to which it relates. Taxonomy creates a hierarchy of inheritance, from general down to specific and back: A giant tree, on which there is a unique place for every item, like the leaves at the ends of twigs at the ends of branches connected to a trunk and running deep into the earth." (The Content Strategy Noob) courtesy of basevers

Posted on June 18, 2010 | Permalink

Understanding the Cost of We Can't Find Anything

"One problem I often hear when talking with any organization about new solutions is understanding the cost and inefficiency of their existing way solutions, processes, or general way of doing things. In the past year or two I have used various general measurements around search to help focus the need for improvement not only on search, but the needed information and metadata needed to improve search." (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on May 21, 2010 | Permalink

Interacting with the Semantic Web

"It's about the lines, not the points." (Duane Degler ~ Design for Context)

Posted on May 04, 2010 | Permalink

Findability and Exploration: The future of search

"The majority of people visiting a news website don't care about the front page. They might have reached your site from Google while searching for a very specific topic. They might just be wandering around. Or they're visiting your site because they're interested in one specific event that you cover. This is big. It changes the way we should think about news websites." (Stijn Debrouwere) courtesy of petermorville

Posted on May 04, 2010 | Permalink

Classification Schemes (and when to use them)

"When you do information architecture work you’ll realize that most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. One of the challenges for an IA project is figuring out what way works best for your audience, your content and your project’s goals." (Donna Maurer - UXBooth)

Posted on April 28, 2010 | Permalink

The Art of Narrative and the Semantic Web

"The art of the narrative is one of the strongest threads running through our society and culture, and is in many respects one of the defining traits of humanity. 'The story' is more than just a recitation of facts or assertions (whether real or otherwise). A good story is experiential. It puts each of us as listeners into the narrator's world and frame of mind, let's us live, vicariously, through the experiences that the narrator had or conceived. In many cases we identify with the protagonist, whether the story is an epic fantasy journey through lost worlds, a sports article talking about the clash between two rival football teams, or the reportage of a major political event. We read meaning into these narratives at many level, from the bald statement of fact to the subtle interplay of analysis, implication, innuendo and metaphor, and it is the richness of these metaphors that give meaning to the work." (Kurt Cagle - DevX)

Posted on March 05, 2010 | Permalink

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?

"Organizations are interested in using social tagging technology both within workgroups and across the enterprise. Tagging can supplement information retrieval options in intranets and document management systems, allowing employees to use tags to enhance the findability of internal and external content without waiting for an information professional to categorize it." (Stephanie Lemieux - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on March 02, 2010 | Permalink

Using Microformats: Gateway to the Semantic Web

"In this podcast Karl Stolley discusses his article, Using Microformats: Gateway to the Semantic Web, which appears in the September, 2009 issue of Transactions on Professional Communication. In the article Stolley explains and describes the use of several microformats, which make information marked up in HTML available for use in applications outside of traditional web browsers. Because microformats consist of minor additions to the HTML backbone of common webpages, they represent a simple but significant move toward what Tim Berners-Lee has called the Semantic Web—but without requiring the technical and practical shifts and time demands of a complete XML-based semantic web development approach." (Karl Stolley - IEEE Professional Communication Society)

Posted on October 02, 2009 | Permalink

Survival for the fittest tag

Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization - "Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies." - (Alexis Wichowski - First Monday 14.5)

Posted on May 19, 2009 | Permalink

Do Tags Work?

"Tag! You're it! It seems that everywhere I go on the Web these days is tagged." - (Cathy Marshall - TEKKA 10)

Posted on May 08, 2009 | Permalink

Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework

"This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical framework)." - (dList) - courtesy of jjursa

Posted on April 20, 2009 | Permalink

The next Web of open, linked data

Tim Berners-Lee on TED 2009 - "Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together." - (TED Blog)

Posted on March 13, 2009 | Permalink

Tim Berners-Lee speaks on Linked Data

"This slide set was presented at the TED 2009 conference, 'The Great Unveiling' in Long Beach, CA. USA, 4, Feb 2009." - (W3C)

Posted on February 18, 2009 | Permalink

Optimizing Tagging UI for People and Search

"This content has come from more than four years of research and discussions with people using tools, both inside enterprise and using consumer web tools. As enterprise moves more quickly toward more cost effective tools for capturing and connecting information, they are aware of not only the value of social tools, but tools that get out the way and allow humans to capture, share, and interact in a manner that is as natural as possible with the tools getting smart, not humans having to adopt technology patterns." (Thomas Vanderwal)

Posted on January 27, 2009 | Permalink

Metadata fundamentals for intranets and websites

"This article explores the fundamentals of metadata, as it relates to common intranet and website needs." (James Robertson - Step Two Designs)

Posted on October 20, 2008 | Permalink

Web 3.0: The Rise of the Machines

"The next web will be one of placing humans in context with their objects and visa versa. We'll use the data our objects provide to better observe and manage them, and the energy they require to own, operate, manufacture, and disassemble." (Dan Saffer - Kicker Studio)

Posted on October 15, 2008 | Permalink

Ontology of Folksonomy: A Mash-up of Apples and Oranges

"Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the Social Web. They arise from data about how people associate terms with content that they generate, share, or consume. Recently the two ideas have been put into opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum. This is a false dichotomy; they are more like apples and oranges. In fact, as the Semantic Web matures and the Social Web grows, there is increasing value in applying Semantic Web technologies to the data of the Social Web. This article is an attempt to clarify the distinct roles for ontologies and folksonomies, and previews some new work that applies the two ideas together - an ontology of folksonomy." (Tom Gruber)

Posted on October 14, 2008 | Permalink

Ontology

"In the context of computer and information sciences, an ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse." (Tom Gruber)

Posted on October 14, 2008 | Permalink

Keeping Up With Social Tagging

Video presentation - Thomas Vander Wal presents during the experts workshop 'Social tagging in the knowledge organisation: Perspectives and potentials' on January 21, 2008 - courtesy of wolf nöding

Posted on May 30, 2008 | Permalink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 | Permalink

How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web

"A work of fiction. A Semantic Web scenario. A short feature from a business magazine published in 2009." (Paul Ford) - courtesy of thomas vander wal

Posted on August 06, 2004 | Permalink

Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited

"Ontologies are a way of specifying the structure of domain knowledge in a formal logic designed for machine processing. The effect on information technology is to shift the burden of capturing the meaning of data content from the procedural operations of algorithms and rules to the representation of the data itself." (Michael Denny - xml.com)

Posted on July 18, 2004 | Permalink

eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language

"XMFL is a new language designed to exchange MetaData between websites. The metadata is of topics arranged into facets." (iawiki)

Posted on July 03, 2004 | Permalink

It's time to get serious about metadata

"When it comes to the Web, there is nothing more misunderstood than metadata. Technical people search vainly for a way to automate its creation. Many editors and writers want nothing to do with it. And yet without quality metadata a website cannot properly achieve its objectives. It’s time to get serious about metada." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 27, 2004 | Permalink

Quality metadata makes for successful web content

"Metadata is a web writing skill. It helps your readers quickly find what they need. Metadata is an essential part of successful web sales and marketing efforts. It helps influence people to buy. In every sense, metadata can drive action. It can help you achieve your objectives." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 21, 2004 | Permalink

Website Indexing: Enhancing access to information within websites

"We are primarily back-of-book indexers, but have also worked on journal, database, website and online help indexing, as well as metadata and thesaurus construction for intranets and websites." (Glenda Browne and Jon Jermey)

Posted on May 31, 2004 | Permalink

Metadata: The Art of Adding Signposts 

"Metadata have 4 quality aspects: Show what the information is about, point to useful information only, describe the relevance of information, and are clear." (Marcel van Mackelenbergh)

Posted on May 27, 2004 | Permalink

LanguaL: The International Framework for Food Description

"LanguaL is a multilingual thesaural system using facetted classification. Each food is described by a set of standard, controlled terms chosen from facets characteristic of the nutritional and/or hygienic quality of a food, as for example the biological origin, the methods of cooking and conservation, and technological treatments." (About LanguaL) - courtesy of peter vandijck

Posted on May 27, 2004 | Permalink

Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy

"(...) a brief introduction on taxonomy and metadata (what I call content classification requirements), this article will focus on finding and utilizing such relationships in hierarchies." (Christian Ricci - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on May 25, 2004 | Permalink

Berners-Lee Keeps WWW 2004 Focused on Semantic Web

Posted on May 23, 2004 | Permalink

Here is a How to Topic Maps, Sir!

"There is a great deal of philosophy involved in working with Topic Maps. Not in the sense of arguing for extentionalism or purport a theory of when cats die in boxes, but in the sense of epistemology, the philosophy of learning. It is about how we perceive things, how human cognition works, about how we label things, how we categorise and find our way in the vast information layer between our brains and our tools." (Alexander Johannesen) - courtesy of column two

Posted on May 04, 2004 | Permalink

Metadata on the Web: On the integration of RDF and TopicMaps

"The Semantic Web is an on-going large-scale effort to improve the current architecture of the World Wide Web by adding a semantic infrastructure to web resources that can be used for sophisticated data-oriented applications. As its basis, we identify metadata, or information about information, that unambiguously specify machine-understandable facts about web resources." (Paolo Ciancarini et al. - Extreme Markup Languages 2003)

Posted on May 03, 2004 | Permalink

Information taxonomy plays a critical role in Web site design and search processes

"Information taxonomy is a Web developer's best friend because it can help reach those two most elusive goals of effective Web design: user satisfaction and return on investment. Conversely, even the most efficient search engine cannot completely overcome problems caused by poorly conceived or completely absent information taxonomy." (ZDNet)

Posted on March 31, 2004 | Permalink

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!

"To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval." (Lars Marius Garshol - Ontopia)

Posted on March 25, 2004 | Permalink

Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics

"The Internet is a giant semiotic system. It is a massive collection of Peirce's three kinds of signs: icons, which show the form of something; indices, which point to something; and symbols, which represent something according to some convention. But current proposals for ontologies and metadata have overlooked some of the most important features of signs." (John Sowa)

Posted on March 18, 2004 | Permalink

Towards a Semantic Web for Culture

"New ways are proposed of visualizing knowledge using a time/space horizon to distinguish between universals and particulars. It is suggested that new visualization methods make possible a history of questions as well as of answers, thus enabling dynamic access to cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge. Unlike earlier media, which were limited to recording factual dimensions of collective memory, digital media enable us to explore theories, ways of perceiving, ways of knowing; to enter into other mindsets and world-views and thus to attain novel insights and new levels of tolerance. Some practical consequences are outlined." (Kim H. Veltman - Journal of Digital Information)

Posted on March 18, 2004 | Permalink

Vocabulary Mapping for Terminology Services

"The paper describes a project to add value to controlled vocabularies by making inter-vocabulary associations. A methodology for mapping terms from one vocabulary to another is presented in the form of a case study applying the approach to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Thesaurus and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Our approach to mapping involves encoding vocabularies according to Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) standards, machine matching of vocabulary terms, and categorizing candidate mappings by likelihood of valid mapping. Mapping data is then stored as machine links. Vocabularies with associations to other schemes will be a key component of Web-based terminology services. The paper briefly describes how the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is used to provide access to a vocabulary with mappings." (Diane Vizine-Goetz et al. - Journal of Digital Information)

Posted on March 18, 2004 | Permalink

Taxonomy and Metadata Strategies for Effective Content Management

"There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo like the word 'taxonomy' that is being thrown around to describe how to manage so-called unstructured content like business documents, web site pages, and old fashioned technical reports and articles. On the one hand, we want to remember what we already know about how to create a useful core catalog record to describe a content object so it can be found again later when needed. On the other hand, there are some bad habits and obsolete ideas like inverted file indexes that we need to get beyond. This talk is about what we have seen in dozens of applied information management projects over the past few years, and how you can take advantage of what you already know to solve big problems like these in your own organizations." (Joseph Busch - Potomac Valley Chapter of ASIS&T)

Posted on March 10, 2004 | Permalink

Faceted Access: A review of the literature

"The purpose of this paper is to define what is meant by facet analysis, and to review briefly the history of facet analysis within the context of other types of subject analysis in libraries and within the context of information retrieval research." (Amanda Maple)

Posted on March 08, 2004 | Permalink

Ranganathan's Colon Classification: A selected and annotated bibliography

"Classification schemes can be described as enumerative (Library of Congress Classification), hierarchical (Dewey Decimal Classification) and analytico-synthetic or faceted (Colon Classification)." (Nicole Aerts, Jan Green and Lorna McAdam)

Posted on March 08, 2004 | Permalink

Faceted Browse

"(...) collection of stuff about faceted browse." (Keith Instone) - courtesy of ia summit blog

Posted on March 02, 2004 | Permalink

Taxonomy Stategies: Bibliography of Resources

"Most of the items selected are written for a general business audience, or are a basic primer on the particular topic. Much of the material is freely available on the web. Some of the material is analyst reports that are accessible only to subscribers, but may be particularly persuasive in larger organizations. All web citations indicate the date they were last checked, but web content is not always persistent. Items have been organized under the following topics: information architecture, information retreival, search research, meta data, semantic web, and taxonomy." (Taxonomy Strategies)

Posted on March 01, 2004 | Permalink

Metadata: Seven tips for writing better keywords

"The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword meta tag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on February 29, 2004 | Permalink

Living with topic maps and RDF

"This paper is about the relationship between the topic map and RDF standards families. It compares the two technologies and looks at ways to make it easier for users to live in a world were both technologies are used. This is done by looking at how to convert information back and forth between the two technologies, how to convert schema information, and how to do queries across both information representations. Ways to achieve all of these goals are presented." (Lars Marius Garshol - ontopia) - courtesy of peter van dijck

Posted on February 25, 2004 | Permalink

Judging the likely Success of an Ontology

"(...) the Semantic web will only work if it is a melange of multiple interoperable Ontologies. What is missing from the debate is a more detailed explanation of what ontologies are good at, how they interoperate, and why systems based on ontologies succeed or fail. From my perspective as a systems designer this last point is the most significant. Debates about theory are nice, but examples of real solutions are more instructive. This essay will begin to examine this question by attempting to define the anatomy of an ontology. I will use this structure in later essays to examine the reasons for success and failure of individual ontologies." (John R. Harris - Virtual Travelog) - courtesy of xblog

Posted on January 23, 2004 | Permalink

What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model?

"Taxonomies and thesauri may relate terms in a controlled vocabulary via parent-child and associative relationships, but do not contain explicit grammar rules to constrain how to use controlled vocabulary terms to express (model) something meaningful within a domain of interest. A meta-model is an ontology used by modelers. People make commitments to use a specific controlled vocabulary or ontology for a domain of interest." (Johannes Ernst - MetaModel) - courtesy of xblog

Posted on January 21, 2004 | Permalink

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

"This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web." (William Denton - Miskatonic University Press)

Posted on January 05, 2004 | Permalink

Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology

"Sharing common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents is one of the more common goals in developing ontologies (...)" (Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness - Stanford university) - courtesy of kottke

Posted on January 01, 2004 | Permalink

Book review: Spinning the semantic web

"Are you looking for a method for managing Web data in a useful and orderly format? Your search is over. This handbook is both a good introduction for the metadata neophyte and a useful reference for the semantically hip." (Carl Bedingfield - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on December 10, 2003 | Permalink

Skip this rant and read Shirky

"If this all sounds like the Mother of all Migraines, you're spot on. Probably too challenging for most of us, even if our content management systems suddenly sprouted new code to adequately support metadata management. And even if we could get everyone in our organizations - or, in the case of the Semantic Web, every web publisher on the planet - to share the same 'world views' as expressed by metadata." (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted on December 03, 2003 | Permalink

Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion

"My apologies in advance for being simplistic in this write-up - despite having developed a language that has some semantics in it, I am far from an expert on the semantic web. " (Peter Van Dijck) - courtesy of the other blog

Posted on December 01, 2003 | Permalink

2003 Dublin Core conference: Supporting communities of discourse and practice - Metadata research & applications

"Overall the conference showed lots of enthusiasm in the use of standardized metadata for future inter-operability between institutions such as libraries, government agencies, and corporations. It was interesting to hear various DC people acknowledge that they needed more awareness of how DC was being used in non-traditional settings and ways, such as in corporations, with hardware, and in conjunction with other standards. It will be exciting to see how Dublin Core metadata and other metadata standards start to share a common ground with the information architecture community." (Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan and Sarah Rice - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 25, 2003 | Permalink

Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences

"What sorts of things order these piles, locations, and implicit labels? We have certain knowledge of these intimate spaces, classifications that seem to live partly in our hands - definitely not just in the head or in any formal algorithm. The knowledge about which thing will be useful at any given moment is embodied in a flow of mundane tasks and practices and many varied social roles (...)" (Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star) - courtesy of fabio sergio

Posted on November 14, 2003 | Permalink

Merging metadata and content-based retrieval

"Educational digital libraries employ resource discovery systems that are aimed at providing educators and learners with curriculum materials to support learning in both formal and informal settings. The article describes a 'hybrid' educational resource discovery system, which combines metadata and content-based retrieval methods. This hybrid system was implemented and evaluated in the context of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). A pilot study was conducted to compare this hybrid system with an existing metadata-based system, with the aim of finding out if the hybrid system helps educators locate relevant resources with less effort. The results of the study suggest that the hybrid system decreased the variability in the number of user actions required to locate learning resources. The hybrid system interface featured embedded links, pointing to inner pages within a larger compound learning resource; study participants made use of these embedded links to locate individual learning objects." (Dave Deniman et al. - Journal of Digital Information 4.3)

Posted on November 10, 2003 | Permalink

Can XML Drive Taxonomies and Categorization?

"Content management technology is almost de rigueur now in medium and large organizations, and along with it the problems of information overload. As a result, taxonomy development is now viewed as a core business issue." (Bill Trippe - EContent) - courtesy of column two

Posted on November 04, 2003 | Permalink

Putting Facets on the Web: An Annotated Bibliography

"This is a classified, annotated bibliography about how to design faceted classification systems and make them usable on the World Wide Web." (William Denton - Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted on November 01, 2003 | Permalink

Controlled Vocabularies: A Glosso-Thesaurus

"(...) the glossary is itself a controlled vocabulary, more specifically a thesaurus. So you will find all of the standard features of any thesaurus: broader, narrower, and variant term indicators, as well as scope notes. In this case, however, the scope notes provide the definition of the particular glossary term being presented." (Karl Fast et al. - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 29, 2003 | Permalink

Commercializing the Semantic Web

"Whether people deny it or not (...) the Semantic Web really is an attempt to reconceptualize and reengineer AI for the Web." (Kendall Grant Clark - xml.com)

Posted on October 24, 2003 | Permalink

Faceted Classification

"A faceted classification uses clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties, or characteristics (a.k.a. facets) of a class or specific subject. The idea for a faceted classification really began with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) in which a standard number representing place (location) was appended to a subject number by a device now known as a facet indicator. However, Dewey did not develop the idea further and in the early 1930s, Ranganathan formalized the use of the fully faceted approach with his Colon Classification. Other classification schemes such as Universal Decimal Classification, now provide facets for places, time periods and forms. More recently, work has been undertaken to develop the Bliss Bibliographic Classification (BC2) into a fully faceted classification scheme." (School of Library, Archival and Information Studies - The University of British Columbia) - courtesy of james robertson

Posted on October 23, 2003 | Permalink

OWL Web Ontology Language Use Cases and Requirements

"This document specifies usage scenarios, goals and requirements for a web ontology language. An ontology formally defines a common set of terms that are used to describe and represent a domain. Ontologies can be used by automated tools to power advanced services such as more accurate Web search, intelligent software agents and knowledge management." (W3C)

Posted on September 21, 2003 | Permalink

Putting it Together: Taxonomy, Classification & Search

"The more complex the enterprise, the greater the need to search among multiple sources, but the one- or two-word search used by most people 'doesn't give much complexity in the results (...)." (Jeff Morris - Transform Magazine) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on September 18, 2003 | Permalink

Synonym Rings and Authority Files

"Synonym rings and authority files are simple, common-sense ways to help users connect the various semantic concepts that are inherently intertwined with the term they choose. They are particularly good for large decentralized sites that are search dominant and have little centralized control over content." (Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on August 27, 2003 | Permalink

Toward the Evocation of Meaning

"From Greek and Roman times to the modern period, architecture has been created in a search of the answer to the question 'What is architecture?' Not only architecture but the epistemological question of what being is, of what the existence of the world is, has been the central issue of Western metaphysics from the time of Aristotle, through Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and the thinkers of the modern age. The presupposition of this epistemological search has been that there is a single and true notion of existence that can be fully described based in terms of logos, or reason. The epistemology of architecture has been that there is a sole, universal, true phenomenon 'architecture', which can be comprehended logically by people of every nationality and culture. This epistemology is identical with the epistemology of the Modern Architecture of the modern age." (Kisho Kurokawa) - courtesy of kelake

Posted on August 26, 2003 | Permalink

A Thesaurus Interchange Format for the Semantic Web

"(...) the Thesaurus Interchange Format (TIF) enables the development, integration and deployment of thesauri on the semantic web. The TIF is an RDF schema, based on the concept-oriented thesaurus model." (SWAD-Europe)

Posted on August 21, 2003 | Permalink

The Four Basic Ontologies of Semantic Interpretation

"This paper compares the semantic interpretation of logical, programming, and natural languages. It shows that they are based on different ontologies, and investigates the relation between the ontology assumed and the analysis of empirical phenomena such as propositional attitudes, truth, and the implementation of procedural semantics." (Roland Hausser - Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Abteilung Computerlinguistik) - courtesy of langemark

Posted on July 19, 2003 | Permalink

Understanding Information Taxonomy Helps Build Better Apps

"Taxonomy represents the foundation upon which information architecture stands, and all well-rounded developers should have at least a basic understanding of taxonomy to ensure that they can create organized, logical applications. But before diving into the topic of taxonomy, let's look briefly at information architecture. That way, we can view taxonomy in its proper place within a broader field of study." (Jie-Hong Morrison - Builder.com) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted on June 27, 2003 | Permalink

Publications of Yannis Tzizikas

Search, Faceted Taxonomies, and Information Retreival (Yannis Tzizikas) - courtesy of peter van dijck

Posted on June 19, 2003 | Permalink

Metadata is Essential Web Writing Skill

"Creating great metadata for your content begins with understanding who your reader is. What is the metadata they look for when they read a page of your content? What are the type of words they use when they search for your content? When scanning your classification, what are the "trigger words" that will make them want to go deeper into your website?" - (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 09, 2003 | Permalink

Metadata is Essential Web Writing Skill

"Metadata is one of the most misunderstood aspects of content management and website design. Editors and writers tend to look at it as a technical issue. Technical people look for a software solution. Both are wrong. Metadata is a fundamental skill that web writers and editors must acquire." - (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 02, 2003 | Permalink

Taxomita: Distributed Metadata for Information Geeks

"Taxomita is a tool for creating faceted taxonomies using PHP and MySQL." (Peter van Dijck)

Posted on May 13, 2003 | Permalink

Digging into the Web: XML, Meta Data and Other Paths to Unstructured Data

"While the Web is widely recognized as an amazing source of unstructured data, much of this data is rather difficult to search and navigate. In fact, the Web was organized along a model meant for human consumption, not for optimizing machine searches." (Robert Blumberg and Shaku Atre - DMReview) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted on May 09, 2003 | Permalink

Building a Metadata-Based Website

"The intent of using a centralized metadata repository as the basis of navigation for a website is to separate business concepts from the content or functionality about those concepts." (Brett Lider and Anca Mosoiu - Boxes and Arrrows)

Posted on April 22, 2003 | Permalink

On Semantics and Markup

"The term 'Semantic Markup' is bandied about freely, and with every year that passes, it makes me more and more nervous. Herewith an exploration of what, if anything, those two terms mean when placed side by side." (Tim Bray - Antartica Systems)

Posted on April 11, 2003 | Permalink

The TAO of Topic Maps

Finding the way in the age of the infoglut - updated version (Steve Pepper - Land of Ontopia)

Posted on April 09, 2003 | Permalink

Publications on Thesaurus Construction and Use

"(...) a list of printed and electronic publications about the principles of constructing and using information retrieval thesauri. (...) References on facet analysis, systems that provide for thesaurus use by combining terms from multiple facets in search interfaces and lists of thesauri (...) In this context, an ontology appears to be a development of a thesaurus, with a greater number of kinds of relationship between concepts, intended to be useful to software implementing aspects of the proposed 'semantic web'. A topic map appears to be a way of structuring such an ontology, with the addition of links between concepts and information resources." (Willpower Information) - courtesy of karl fast, fred leise and mike steckel

Posted on April 08, 2003 | Permalink

Creating a Controlled Vocabulary

"(...) we are looking at a process for creating any kind of controlled vocabulary. While our ultimate goal in this series is to explain facets, the details of facet analysis will be described in a future article. At this point, we are still exploring fundamental concepts and techniques." (Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 08, 2003 | Permalink

The Semantic Web: More than a Vision 

"The technology underlying the web is unprecedented and affords us new opportunities to turn segments of the growing mass of electronic information into new intelligence for both humans and computers." (ASIS&T Bulletin April/May 2003)

Posted on March 21, 2003 | Permalink

A Metadata Primer

"What is missing is information about the information - that is, labeling, cataloging and descriptive information - that enables a computer to properly process and search the content elements. This information about information is known as metadata." (Ann Rockley - CMS Watch) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on March 19, 2003 | Permalink

Why You Need Your Very Own Taxonomy

"A search engine, on your intranet or at Google, makes use of innovative algorithms and dazzling mathematics. But judging whether these results are any good or not is completely in the eye of the beholder. It's subjective." (Tom Smith - theOTHERMedia)

Posted on March 18, 2003 | Permalink

What Are The Differences Between A Vocabulary, A Taxonomy, A Thesaurus, An Ontology, And A Meta-Model?

"This excellent overview was contributed by Woody Pidcock of the Boeing company. Many organizations and companies are struggling with these terms and the ideas behind them; this set of definitions will help to clarify." (Metamodel) courtesy of elearning

Posted on March 06, 2003 | Permalink

Learning Objects Metadata: Implementations and Open Issues

"(...) to facilitate to the development of large-scale distributed learning frameworks and new models of learning resources design and delivery, but have a limited implementation experience behind them." (Kateryna Synytsya - IEEE Learning Technology Newsletter 5.1) - courtesy of elearning

Posted on February 25, 2003 | Permalink

A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis

"This article originally appeared in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science v23, 1-30 (April-July 1998)." (Dr. Louise Spiteri - AIfIA)

Posted on February 19, 2003 | Permalink

Controlled Vocabulary

"A controlled vocabulary is often used to make a database easier to search." (David Riecks) - courtesy of poor but happy

Posted on February 17, 2003 | Permalink

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology December/January 2003

Special Section: Mining the Metadata Quarries (ASIS&T)

Posted on January 28, 2003 | Permalink

Introduction to XFML

"XFML is a simple XML format for exchanging metadata in the form of faceted hierarchies, sometimes called taxonomies." (Peter van Dijck - XML.com)

Posted on January 24, 2003 | Permalink

Faceted Approach to Web Redesign

"A site's information architecture is not usually the first thing that comes to the minds of web developers. Most of the time it is only after a site is built that the deficiencies are noted and solutions are sought. At that point an assessment of the information architecture becomes a task that should be considered." (Barbara Gulten & Jonathan Broad - IAWiki)

Posted on January 07, 2003 | Permalink

Faceted Metadata Search and Browse

"Metadata is information about information: more precisely, it's structured information about resources." (Search Tools)

Posted on January 03, 2003 | Permalink

What Is A Controlled Vocabulary?

"A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user." (Karl Fast et al. - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on December 17, 2002 | Permalink

All About Facets & Controlled Vocabularies

"Information architects are fascinated with faceted classification and its application to information architecture problems. However, facets remain difficult to understand and there are few options for learning about them." (Karl Fast et al. - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on December 10, 2002 | Permalink

Ramana Rao's Information Flow

"Ranganathan's objection to the prevailing classification systems, such as Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification, was that they tried to enumerate all possible subjects and provide preconceived pigeonholes to accommodate all documents." (Ramana Rao)

Posted on December 09, 2002 | Permalink

Ten Taxonomy Myths

"Taxonomies have recently emerged from the quiet backwaters of biology, book indexing, and library science into the corporate limelight." (Montague Institute Review)

Posted on December 06, 2002 | Permalink

Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs

"Which would be easier to remember: one thousand individual terms or three facets of ten terms each?" (Yannis Tzitzikas - ERCIM News: Semantic Web Special)

Posted on December 02, 2002 | Permalink

Death of a Meta Tag

"In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead." (Danny Sullivan - ClickZ)

Posted on November 19, 2002 | Permalink

Metadata and Taxonomies for a More Flexible Information Architecture

"The presentation (...) illustrates how an information architecture based on taxonomies and metadata can be used to make a number of basic Web site and Intranet functions more flexible and dynamic." (Amy J. Warner - Lexonomy)

Posted on October 24, 2002 | Permalink

Introduction to XFML Concepts

XFML is an XML language to share hierarchical faceted metadata. (Peter van Dijck - Evolt)

Posted on October 24, 2002 | Permalink

A Taxonomy Primer

"Taxonomies, thesauri, classification systems, synonym rings. (...) All of the terms mentioned above are controlled vocabularies." (Lexonomy)

Posted on October 21, 2002 | Permalink

Faceted Metadata Search and Browse

"Metadata is information about information: more precisely, it's structured information about resources." (Avi Rappoport - Search Tools)

Posted on October 09, 2002 | Permalink

Demystifying Metadata

"Creating metadata is really just techspeak for cataloging." (Marty Lucas - Mappa Mundi)

Posted on September 04, 2002 | Permalink

Ontologies Come of Age

"Ontologies have moved beyond the domains of library science, philosophy, and knowledge representation." (Deborah L. McGuinness - Stanford KSL)

Posted on July 15, 2002 | Permalink

XFML Wiki

"The eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language is an easy language to exchange metadata between websites." (Also: XFML.org)

Posted on July 02, 2002 | Permalink

eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language

"(...) an open XML format to publish and share faceted metadata for websites." (Peter van Dijck)

Posted on June 01, 2002 | Permalink

Taxonomic Distress

The Challenge of Developing Effective Taxonomies for Web-facing Businesses (Lane Becker - Adaptive Path)

Posted on May 29, 2002 | Permalink

FacetMap

"A solution so simple that we can take any metadata you've got, and turn it into a browsing system right here on our servers." (FacetMap.com)

Posted on May 16, 2002 | Permalink

Unraveling The Mysteries Of Metadata And Taxonomies

"Christina Wodtke (...) interviews Samantha Bailey" (Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 11, 2002 | Permalink

Taxonomy, Classification, and Metadata Resources

Set of Online Resources (Scottish Electronic Staff Development Library)

Posted on March 12, 2002 | Permalink

Immersed in Structure: The Meaning and Function of Taxonomies

"Taxonomies are an increasingly popular method of organizing information in a digital environment." (Katherine C. Adams - internetworking)

Posted on March 10, 2002 | Permalink

Building Taxonomies

Sample Chapter from 'Unlocking Knowledge Assets' (Susan Conway & Char Sligar)

Posted on March 07, 2002 | Permalink

Categories for the Description of Works of Art

"(...) guidelines for describing works of art, architecture, groups of objects, and visual and textual surrogates." (J. Paul Getty Trust)

Posted on February 13, 2002 | Permalink

Mind Your Phraseology!

Using controlled vocabularies to improve findability (Christina Wodtke - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on January 14, 2002 | Permalink

Digital Libraries

Metadata Resources (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions)

Posted on December 17, 2001 | Permalink

Taxonomies Put Content in Context

"(...) the problem of designing systems that have a humanlike understanding of words, concepts and categories is far from solved." (Russell Letson - Transform Magazine)

Posted on December 01, 2001 | Permalink

Converting A Controlled Vocabulary Into An Ontology

"The prevalance of digital information raised issues regarding the suitability of conventional library tools for organizing information." (Jian Qin & Stephen Paling - School of Information Studies Syracuse University)

Posted on November 27, 2001 | Permalink

The TAO of Topic Maps

Finding the way in the age of infoglut (Steve Pepper - Infostream)

Posted on October 02, 2001 | Permalink

Faceted Classification

"A facet is a clearly definied, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties or characteristics of a class or specific subject" (Ranganthan: Ahead of his Century)

Posted on September 24, 2001 | Permalink

The Semantic Web: An Introduction

"(...) a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines" (Sean B. Palmer)

Posted on September 19, 2001 | Permalink

Controlled Vocabularies Resource Guide

"(...) examples of thesauri and to classification schemes that may be used for controlling database or WWW site subject content." (Michael Middleton)

Posted on September 18, 2001 | Permalink

Taxonomies and Topic Maps: Categorization Steps Forward

"How do average users find the information they need amidst a flood of irrelevant matter?" (Bill Trippe -eContent)

Posted on August 30, 2001 | Permalink

Semantic Problems of Thesaurus Mapping

"(...) the problem of terminology provision and interoperability of controlled vocabulary schemes such as thesauri becomes increasingly urgent" (Martin Doerr - Journal of Digital Information)

Posted on August 01, 2001 | Permalink

Principia Cybernetica Web

"(...) to develop a complete philosophy or "world-view", based on the principles of evolutionary cybernetics, and supported by collaborative computer technologies." (Editorial Board: Turchin, Joslyn, Heylighen, Bollen)

Posted on August 11, 2000 | Permalink

Thesauri Online

"There are many thesauri available through the Internet" (American Society of Indexers)

Posted on August 07, 2000 | Permalink

The Visual Thesaurus

(Plump Design)

Posted on May 08, 2000 | Permalink

Topic Navigation Maps

help organize and retrieve online information" (InfoLoom)

Posted on April 20, 2000 | Permalink