VocabControl

Internet of Things — An action plan for Europe is an EU document describing the EU’s response to “The Internet of Things” (IoT), as technologies such as
RFID, Near Field Communication (NFC), and wireless sensor/actuators now allow objects to be tagged and linked to information.

The EC is financing “research projects in the area of IoT, putting an emphasis on important technological aspects such as microelectronics, non-silicon based components, energy harvesting technologies, ubiquitous positioning, networks of wirelessly
communicating smart systems, semantics, privacy- and security-by-design, software emulating human reasoning and on novel applications.”

As well as obvious information management issues, there are interesting implications for privacy and security. For example, will the IoT reduce property crime or just create a black market for false tags or fake URIs and geolocators? Will criminals set up their own systems to track shipments of contraband? Will we get “object identity theft” with contraband labelled as legitimate goods? This seems to me to be a categorisation issue.

It might be fun to be able to tag my stuff with my own folksonomic labels to help me sort my house out or pack to go on holiday, and then make sure I don’t leave things in hotel rooms, but I suspect it might waste more time than it saves!

Another issue is how long before we extend this kind of tracking to ourselves? A friend said to me the other day that we should all have our own URI, which would save having to update our records when people change their phone numbers, email, addresses, etc. Add that to the geolocation tracking that is already happening, and no-one will get to be anywhere without it being recorded. Is that really useful, or scarily Big Brotherish?

There is a lovely metpahor of “Favela chic” (subversive, non-commerical) versus “Gothic High Tech” (repressive regime) in Twitter and The Web of Flow: Talking with Stowe Boyd & Bruce Sterling about Microsyntax, Squelettes, Favela Chic and the State of Now which I found via Open Intelligence (on Twitter!).

I’ve given the conference a whole page as there were so many fascinating presentations. The conference website has all the proceedings: papers, abstracts, slides, etc., so my write-up is just some of my personal observations. There were two tracks, so I didn’t hear every presentation.

I would like to thank everyone who looked at my poster and for all your support and kind comments.

Science Daily: “Carl Linnaeus is most famous as the father of modern taxonomy. What’s not so well known is that in his effort to manage vast amounts of data, he came up with a revolutionary invention: the index card.”

via

boingboing.

Journalism.co.uk :: Do publications need style guides for data? That would be nice - can we tidy them all up and semantic webify everything while we’re at it?

My short paper on using Helen Longino’s framework for assessing the objectivity of taxonomy projects has gone off for peer review. It is a short version of the research I have been doing for my Masters and I am enormously grateful to all the wonderful taxonomists, thesaurus editors, metadata managers, and other information professionals who have been so generous with their time, knowledge, enthusiasm, and encouragement. I feel far more like a compiler and editor of other people’s work than an author. I highlight the importance of being open and responsive to comments and criticisms, so look forward to receiving some!

Content Strategy - a knol by Jeffrey MacIntyre - it sounds like I’ve been being a content strategist without realising it too!

Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design is another classic I should almost certainly have read ages ago. It gives very straigthforward explanations of why language and cognition are complex social processes and how this presents huge challenges for designers and for the whole field of AI.

I also enjoyed the wonderful predictions that by 1988 we would have “thinking computers” and advertisements from 1982 offering “programs that understand you so that you don’t have to understand them”. Technology progresses, hype remains a constant!

It is also interesting that “not having to understand” was promoted, rather than “being easy to understand”, even back then. I’ve always thought of usability about being helpful and increasing clarity, rather than about encouraging people not to think at all.

Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? heralds the new kid soon to be on the block. Facebook seem to fall into the “so over” category a while back, and now Twitter has hit the mainstream, clearly it is next to go.

Google Wave: Five Things You Must Know says a bit more about what Wave will do.

The combination of easy transfer of time-invested work - such as carefully written documents - with instant communication should appeal to businesses but will present some records management challenges, I’m sure. I can’t decide whether we need social media coalescence - just give me everything in one place - or clearer fragmentation - Wave for work, Facebook for family, etc. to help with information overload.

UPDATE: Amplified clip on Wave.

Do tags work? is a detailed informal study of tagging on flickr, via Taxonomy Watch: Tags - Not so Useful.

I liked the way this Pasta&Vinegar post highlighted the different information sources used to generate different measures of technology adoption. It also reminded me of Dave Snowden’s emphasis on the importance of detecting weak signals. At the “prophecy/fantasy” stage the important signals will inevitably be weak, and surrounded by a lot of noise. Spotting trends once they have happened is one thing, but the prediction game is quite different.