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April 23, 2008
Ike Piggott posts about the effect of tags ‘n’ such on identity politics. Nicely done. (And, if I may say be so self-centered he seems unknowingly to be channeling Everything Is Miscellaneous.)
April 21, 2008
YaCy is a peer-to-peer, open source Web search engine. You can use it to create a search portal, but the officially Very Cool thing about it is that you can peer it up with other Yacy installations, creating a distributed, p2p search engine.
April 14, 2008
I haven’t tried Drop.io yet, but I like the faq. It makes it easier to share stuff than by FTP’ing it, and it adds a little value to what you share when it can: It adds thumbnails to photos, etc. You can add to a “drop” via the Web, phone, email, or fax. You can set a drop so that it’s read-only or so that others can add or delete to it. The site isn’t indexed, so it’s as private as the people you tell about a drop care to keep it. Drop.io not only is free, it doesn’t require you to give your email address.
Ok, I just tried it and hit a glitch: Uploads freeze about 5% of the way in this morning. Could be them, could be the Net, either way, it’s got to be temporary…
April 13, 2008
ISO’s taking over of Microsoft’s 8,000 page specification of the “open” standard based on Word’s document model has been slashdotted with typical, um, vigor.
April 11, 2008
A librarians’ group is meeting today at the Berkman Center to talk about the future of libraries. Gene Koo, Jake Shapiro, and Melanie
Dulong de Rosnay, all of the Berkman.
I’m supposed to give a discussion-opener later this afternoon. Here are the notes of what I’m thinking of saying:
– Two themes
– metadata over content
– socializing of knowledge– Knowledge as content
– K was a quality of a belief
– Became content esp. with books
– Good fit because K was believed to be universal, single and eternal – permanence of books
– Christian belief in a single universal truth
– Books created:
– topics as self-contained
– experts as containers– Web/Net
– Primary characteristic: Abundance
– Abundance of good is scarier than abundance of crap
– Web invented to deal with abundance by giving us links…gives human-mediated shape to the endless sea
– Links destroy container model
– Web as social realm leads to socialization of K– Socialization of K is all about metadata
– e.g., this is worth reading, this is wrong, this connects to that
– Paper-based metadata throws out info
– Digital includes it all
– Means that in general we get good enough info (but is that good enough?)
– What does this mean for digital libraries?
– Library is all metadata
– distributed content
– Place for expert and social knowingQuestion: Digital libraries have nothing in common with libraries?
(Pardon the compressed form. These are my notes.)
April 8, 2008
This is a Google-automated translation of the Baidu page on Obama. (Baidu is the Chinese search engine.)
* * *
Ethan Zuckerman says his favorite way to browse GlobalVoices is through the digests page.
April 7, 2008
Nice post today by Gene Koo about Wikipedia’s view of truth in a postmodern world. A social process replaces the simple one-to-one relationship which we used to think “knowing” was. Something like that.
April 4, 2008
Steve Pepper begins by talking about Vannevar Bush, whose influence on the Web has been profound. Bush was concerned with finding info, says Steve. His aim was to model how we find info on how the human mind works, i.e., by association. But, says Steve, Bush’s memex revolved entirely around documents, which is not how we think. [Caution: Live-blogging!]
Documents are about subjects. Subjects exist as concepts in our brains. They’re connected by a network of associations. Docs are how we happen to capture and communicate ideas. “Hypertext has been barking up the wrong tree” ever since the memex. (Steve then couches this more softly, acknowledging how much he loves the Web, etc.) We should be organizing information around topics/subjects, not around documents.
Why? Because topic maps reflect how we think. That’s why topic maps are ideal fo web sites. They’re subject-based associative. See topicmaps.com.
Steve counters the impression that topic maps are a portal technology. They were invented in 1991, before the Web. They “just turned out to be ideal for the purpose.” Until recently, they were mainly used for portals, but now they’re used increasingly to represent domains of knowledge. TMs are bigger than Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO), for knowledge has a context. The concept of scope enables the rexpression of contextual validity, enabling multiple viewpoints. This makes topic maps more than a simple semantic tech. Semantics are decontextualized meaning, whereas pragmatics is contextuaiized meaning. See www.hoyre.no
Merging “is the single most powerful feature of topic maps.” Merging was the original motivation for topic maps, merging multiple indexes. It enables a “global knowledge federation.” You can arbitrarily merge any two topic maps. That can’t be done with relational databases or XML documents. But how to make it useful? It vcan’t be done by relying on names since every subject has multiple names, says Steve. The only solution for computers is identifiers. A topic in a topic map is a symbol that represents something in the real world, says Steve. He quotes the ISO definition: “A subject is any ‘thing’ whatsoever, whether or not it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means whatsoever.”
Meaning is expressed through the relationship between the representation and that to which it refers. Subject identifiers are central to topic maps. For example, which Steve Pepper wrote the letter of protest to the ISO committee? There’s a Steve Pepper in NJ who has a CD called “The Information Age.” But if you look at the metadata on the PDF of Steve’s letter, there’s a URI that describes Steve. This allows humans to disambiguate. At the moment there’s no good way to register such identities. “PSIs [Published Subject Identifiers] are perhaps not the final answer, but they’re a pretty good stopgap” and can easily be remapped if something else turns out to be the answer.
Steve ends by asking Microsoft to become more subject-centric. Windows is highly document-centric he says. He wants a desktop that shows him the subjects and topics he cares about, rather than folders and apps. Although there are some Semantic Web people working on a semantic desktop, Steve thinks Topic Maps is better for human-facing representations of knowledge. Why not have an entire subject-centric operating system, he asks: NLP for categorizing docukents, p2p, facilities for merges, etc.
Topic maps started out as a way to merge indexes, Steve says. It turned into a knowledge representation formalism. Now it’s the flag-bearer for subject-centric computing. Subject-centric computing is a paradigm shift, Steve says, comparing it to object-oriented programming, and then to the Copernican revolution.
April 3, 2008
Sam Oh teaches at Sungkyunkwan U in Korea and heads the ISO committee responsible for Topic Maps (among other things). (I had the pleasure and honor of having dinner with him last night.) [Caution: Live-Blogging]
FRBR tries to capture the various levels of abstraction of our works. Group 1 consists of: work, expression, manifestation, and item. “A work is realized through an expression” that is “embodied in” a manifestation and “is exemplified by an item.” E.g., Othello is a work which may be expressed in English or in Korean. A particular edition of a book is a manifestation, while a particular copy is an item.
Group 2 consists of people and corporate bodies responsible for creating Group 1.
Group 3 are the subject entities that “serve as the subjects of intellectual or artistic endeavor” Concept (topical subject heading), object (name for an object), even (name for an event), place (name for a place). Sam says that FRBR adopted these from topic maps.
There are some defined relationships among these three grups: A work is by a person, a manifestation may be produced by a corporate bdy, etc. Ad there are work to work relationships such as successor, supplement, complement, translation, etc.
Currently, everything is focused on the manifestation level. That’s at the center of the map, so to speak. A future direction for library systems: Applying FRBR in services to present search results, to streamline cataloging, and to express new insights into works. FRBR can “naturally” be rendered in topic maps, he says.
Sam talks about mapping MARC (standard bibliographic records) to FRBR. The OCLC has an algorithm for converting these.
He shows some examples of pages and maps. He also notes that FRBR’s terms for talking about these levels of expression aren’t clear to a general public. E.g., most people don’t talk about “manifestations.” He’d like to see better terms, especially as FRBR gets exposed more widely. He also thinks the library community should come to know topic maps better.
Petter Thorsrud is a senior advisor to the Norwegian government and responsible for the government’s Web site. He’s going to talk about the “State of the Nation” with regard to semantic interoperability. There was a forum last fall with many governmental groups participating, including education, municipal services, parliament, tax services, etc. Things are moving along.
Marit Lofnes Mellingen [maybe — that’s who’s listed in the program, but they didn’t introduce her by name] gives some examples of semantic interoperability. Semantics is about agreeing on names, she says. The agreement should be minimal so you don’t have to agree on the entire universe.
She points to examples in the health sector. In one case, there are 400 subjects organized into two levels of categories, with synonyms, as well as document type, date, organizational relation (= facet). It uses Dublin Core for documents. “MyPage” is a personalized info portal for citizens. It uses the LOS ontology.
Challenges: Extending the adoption of the common ontologies, merging them with others, driving the categories down to the right level of granularity (so users don’t get too much info). To do this, she thinks we should identify “semantic glue” on a lower level. Also, she’d like to see the ontologies published and made free to use, to enable mashups.
Robert Keil (ex of Razor Fish) says behavior is shifting: People now enter pages through searches, not only through the home page. And the number of portals is increasing. Users want info from the government, but there are many portals to the government.
He shows the Parliament portal” Stortinget.no. It tries to create semantic interoperability around topics. They try to make sure all the retrieved documents are relevant to the query. They use topic maps for this. The status of a matter is presented graphically, with the relevant documents arranged via the info in a topic map. They want to be able to show every parliamentary question with all the relevant info.
Altinn is an Internet portal for “public reporting.” You can get your forms and services there for 20 Norwegian government agencies. The information portal is based on topic maps. It’s smart about the dependency of forms on one another.
Status: Robert quotes Petter: “Before sustems can exchange data, the people behind the systems need to echange information.” Robert says there’s a lot of enthusiasm in the government for semanticizing its information. “We are past the tipping point.”
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