John Blyberg has put together a virtual card catalog that lets you build your own, share it with others, and create catalog card facsimiles complete with “handwritten” annotations. [Thanks to Ed Vielmetti for the link.]

O’Reilly has announced the “Rough Cuts” service that gives readers access to works-in-progress: If you buy a book before it’s been published and then watch it being developed. Pretty damn cool.

Yet another assault on time: As more and more events turn into processes, what the hell do we need the present before? [Tags: johnBlyberg libraries taxonomy tagging EverythingIsMiscellaneous oreilly publishing books time]

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Jason Toal had a paper accepted for presentation at the IA Summit. It’s called “The Life of Tags,” (abstract) : “Our paper will pursue potential opportunities for adding a usable layer of rules to the process of tagging.” The sorts of rules are like those in cellular automata systems, such as the game of Life. The abstract puts aside using ontologies to disambiguate tags. Sounds interesting.

So, the first thing Jason did upon hearing his (their?) paper had been accepted was to set up a blog to work on it in public. I know doing this isn’t news, but it still gives me just a smidgeon of hope. What a difference from how research was done ten years ago!

By the way, at the blog I found a link to STEVE — Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement — a project developed by a group of museums to enable social filtering of their collections. Jason writes: “Steve is an attempt to democratize a collections catalogue, not by replacing the curators perspective, but by adding an additional layer of information provided by the public.” Cool. [Tags: jasonToal iaSummit ia taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous museums cellularAutomata]

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North Carolina State University now lets you search its libraries’ collections using faceted classification.

Go to the libraries’ search page and search for any term. For example:

On the search page, enter “military music” (no quotes). It returns a straightforward list of works about military music. But, on the left of the search page are the facets under which the works on the returns list are classified, e.g. Topic, Format, etc. Under each of those is a list of the types available under that facet. E.g., Under Format we see there are 146 books and 16 DVDs about military music. (Think of a facet as a column in a database and the types as the contents of the cells in that column: At an online music site, a column might be Genre and the types might be rock, jazz, classical, etc.)

Under the Topic facet, click on “United States.” You are now shown a list of all the holdings about military music and the US. Notice that the list of facets on the left has changed. For example, DVDs have vanished from the Format facet because the libraries have no DVDs about US miliitary music. Faceted classification systems don’t show you impossible or irrelevant options. No dead ends, no branches without fruit.

Under the Era facet, click “20th Century.” We’re down to three results and the facet list has narrowed dramatically. For example, the Format facet only shows Books and E-Books.

Under the Genre facet, click on “Songs and music.” We’re down to three results and the facet list has narrowed dramatically. The Format facet is entirely gone because all three results are books.

Suppose, however, you decide the list of returns is too small. You’re willing to consider books about more than just the US. Toward the top of the page, on the left, the NCSU site shows you the facets you’ve selected already, with a little red X box next to each. Click on the X next to “United States,” removing it as a selection criterion. Not only does the list of returns expand, now a bunch of facets are back because they’re legitimate choices. Notice that you don’t have to walk back up the tree in the order in which you created it.

Why is this a big deal? Unlike parametric searches that let you enter specifications for your search, a faceted search doesn’t simply apply search criteria. Instead, a faceted classification system — in this instance, called a “guided navigation” system by Endeca, the company behind this implementation — the browsable interface changes with every choice so that it never shows you parameters that would result in an empty results list. So, you don’t have to keep randomly banging on it and then backing up, trying to find the one book you want, or the one left-threaded, chrome-plated, 15mm, philips-headed, round-capped screw you need as you build the specs for your new aircraft engine. And when it turns out there are no screws exactly like that, you can decide you could do without the chrome-plating, or the philips-headedness, until you get something that works. Endeca has a customer with a library of 25 million engineering parts for whom this type of interactive search is a tremendous time and money saver.

As Endeca will tell you, there’s another advantage as well: Faceted systems know a lot about their contents. That’s why they’re able to show you how many entries there are in each branch before you click on it. Endeca uses this information to build data reporting systems that let you click facets in and out, interactively revealing patterns that might otherwise have been hard to find. (Non-disclosure: I am not involved with Endeca, although I’m using them as an example in my book because I think what they’re doing is way cool.)

(Thanks to Peter Morville for the link, who also points to this thread about the implementation.)

[Tags: facetedClassification taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous libraries endeca]

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I’ve just started reading After Method by John Law, a defense of messiness in the social sciences. I’m a couple of chapters in and really liking it. [Tags: metaphysics socialScience johnLaw afterMethod EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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After poking around at Thomas Vander Wal’s site and writings (1 2) and at Wikipedia, it turns out that I think I’m wrong about what “folksonomy” means. (And, yes, I’ve poked around both before.)

Thomas seems to call a folksonomy any set of uncontrolled tags (no prior taxonomy, no controlled vocabulary) done by individuals and posted in public. Thomas likes the term especially if the taggers are supplying tags that make sense to them as individuals, rather than suggesting ones they think will work socially. I assume that means that he thinks that if (oddly) there were absolutely no shared tags at Delicious.com, it’d still count it as a folksonomy.

I had been thinking that a folksonomy is one way order emerges from such set of tags: Some are more popular than others. In fact (I’d thought), if you really want a folksonomy to develop, you give people some feedback about how others are tagging the same or similar objects. (Thomas has a useful distinction between broad and narrow folksonomies that applies here.) That feedback causes further crystallization around particular terms. There are other, non-folksonomic ways order may emerge, including using heuristics to cluster tags.

The difference is this: 1) Any site that enables free tagging is necessarily a folksonomy. or 2. A folksonomy is a way of developing a bottom-up taxonomy from the tags being generated at such a site.

If a folksonomy is #1 not #2, then we need a name for #2. And I have the perfect name for it: A folksonomy. :)

By the way, you can see the difference between the two in the Wikipedia article on folksonomy. It equates “folksonomy” with tagging. In the section of the article that presents problems with folksonomy, the criticisms are criticisms of tagging. For example, the first problem cited is that folksonomies “encourage idiosyncratic tagging…” But by what I thought was the definition, folksonomies actually help solve the problem of overly-idiosyncratic tagging. I was on the verge of “correcting” the Wikipedia article when I realized my definition was off. [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous folksonomy thomasVanderWal tagging]

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Yahoo has done a good job emulating the Mac’s Dashboard widgets with its own Yahoo Widgets. (Yahoo bought Konfabulator to get its Widget engine.) They even look cool like the Mac ones do. But, Yahoo is not doing a good job helping us to find them. For example, there are 186 widgets in the System Utilities folder on the Web site, and 276 in the Fun and Games category. Then there are nine more categories. That’s too much to browse, even if you set it to show 25 at a time.

How about taking a page from Firefox Extensions and offer listings by most popular and highest rated? Or, heaven forbid, do we need a meta-Widget? [Tags: yahoo widgets macintosh firefox]

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An illustration that you can never tell how people are going to want to classify things:

When Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. Hunt and J. Gilbart Smyly discovered the mummies of the “papyrus enriched” holy crocodiles in Egyptian Tebtunis, they sensibly decided to include in the first volume of their publication a “classification of papyri according to crocodiles,” for papyri in the belly of the same animal might reveal relationships reflecting their administrative provenance and an original arrangment.

In Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (The Society of American Archivisits: Chicago, 1972) p. 5 [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous taxonomy crocodiles egypt]

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William Denton has unearthed and posted 15 minutes of SR Ranganathan talking about Melvil Dewey in 1964. Ranganathan was the great reforming library scientist and Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal system. This is like finding 15 minutes of FDR talking about Coolidge or Leibniz talking about Descartes. I can’t wait to hear it, but first I have to make breakfast for our kids… [Tags: taxonomy ranganathan EverythingIsMiscellaneous WilliamDenton]

I’ve transcribed the audio. It’s got lots of holes and errors, so feel free to improve it.

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Yesterday I finished the rough (rough!) draft of Chapter 5 of my book. It’s on the nature of the “leaves” of knowledge that we’re piling up willy-nilly. The aim of the chapter is to show how different that approach is from the traditional assumption that knowledge is a stable, inter-generational domain, divided into disciplines, to which we may get to contribute if our contributions are judged worthy by the gatekeepers.

But what is one of these so-called leaves anyway? I end up arguing that unique identifiers (unique to particular namespaces, although because this is supposed to be a book of general interest, I don’t use the word “namespace”) are important nodes around which meaning clusters, and that’s about as close as we get to there being actual leaves. And since there are multiple namespaces, and then there are all the clusters based not on IDs but on hyperlinks and meanings, the “pile of leaves” metaphor implies too much neatness and order. Knowledge is much more “intertwingled” than that.

“Intertwingularity” was coined by Ted Nelson and is a word that really works.

In the course of the chapter, I talk about ISBNs, the book identifiers. Out of the blue, I chose the edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Rockwell Kent because I was fascinated by the copy my parents had when I was a kid. So, I go on and on about ISBN 0679600108. Yesterday I googled 0679600108 and discovered that it is the example others have used when writing about ISBNs. Out of the gazillion books, why did I choose this one?

In Chapter 5 I also talk about Universal Price Codes and, oddly, go down a path (that I’ll probably delete) about the 1989 decision to expand the UPC to include enough digits to encode information for individually-weighed portions of seafood. (Yes, that’s just how fascinating my book is.)

Then I went for shabbos lunch to our neighbors’ apartment. The husband works in the deli department of a local grocery store. And guess what he starts telling us about? How he individual wraps and prices particular cuts of seafood in order to meet the kosher needs of the community. What are the chances of that coming up in conversation?

Yes, these are at best coincidences. But call ’em synchronicity and a little chill can run down your spine. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous TedNelson]

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Livia Labate has taken Ambient Findability‘s bibliography (Ambient Findability is Peter Morville‘s highly readable and provocative book on, well, findability), entered the URL of each entry into her page at del.icio.us, and tagged each “ambientfindability,” thus making the bibliography entries more ambiently findable. For example, you’ll notice that 13 other people have bookmarked Gene Smith’s “Beyond the Page,” making it a good jumping off point to amble findably through related works. [Tags: tagging taxonomy PeterMorville AmbientFindability EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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