VocabControl

Folksonomies 2.0 is a blog article suggesting “faceted tags” are a way of modifying folksonomies so that they are more useful. Interesting idea - a sort of mid-way point between folksonomies and taxonomies.

Procedure in Taxonomy by Edward T. Schenk and John H. McMasters is a gem of a book, first published in 1936. I read the third edition (published in 1956 and only borrowed 22 times from the library since then - 4 of which were in 1957!). It is a set of instructions and style guides for zoological nomenclature, with additional guides, such as how to select a repository for the storage of type specimens. Its phenomenal precision and attention to detail are a testament to the level of scholarship involved in scientific taxonomy and a reminder of the hours of painstaking effort that went into creating the information-rich world we so easily take for granted today.

Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation by Donald Davidson contains a series of philosophical essays on linguistic topics. I am interested in the way that different people respond differently to the language used in taxonomies and so delved into this to try to get a handle on recent linguistic theory. Most of the essays are very technical but I found the essays on Conceptual Schemes and Communication and Convention quite useful. Davidson argues that it makes no sense to talk of completely mutually unintelligible conceptual schemes. We can only talk about schemes as being different because there are some areas of mutual intelligibility and it is this common ground that enables us to highlight local differences.

In Communication and Convention, he argues that repetition and rules-based language conventions are helpful and usual practice in communication, but not necessary. We do not need to agree in advance a theory of interpretation before we start speaking to someone new, because we can develop this through the process of communication itself. However, it saves an awful lot of time if we just assume they understand language in the same way we do and most of the time they do. If they don’t we can modify our theory and try to establish a means of communication as we go along.

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: what categories reveal about the mind by George Lakoff is a hefty tome and a core text in cognitive science. It is 587 pages long, so there are a lot of ideas in there and I am not going to do it justice in this little blog post! Basically, Lakoff starts by bringing together aspects of the work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, anthropologists, and psychologists - primarily Eleanor Rosch to show how the notion of meaning being rooted in context rather than in some external objective ideal has risen to prominence since the middle of the last century.

Most important for taxonomists is the work of Rosch, whose experiments in the way people form and understand categories shows that categories do not always conform to the “classical” or “folk theory” of categorisation. Since Aristotle, people have assumed that categories are made by noticing “real” properties of things and grouping things by matching those properties. Rosch showed that people actually form categories in various ways, sometimes by grouping matching properties, but sometimes by taking a “central example” and matching similar things that may not actually share any particular properties (e.g. a desk chair is a more typical kind of chair than a bean bag chair, and the two things don’t really have much in common except that we can see they are both sorts of chair). Other ways to form categories include metaphorical association (e.g. communication as liquid in channels) or by metonymy, where a part of something is taken to represent the whole thing (e.g. hands meaning workers).

The categories we choose are also rooted in our nature as physical beings - our colour categories are dependent on the structure of the eye, for example. We also tend to operate most naturally at an “intermediate” level of specificity - the level of the ordinary everyday objects we interact with - books, chairs, dogs, cats, etc - rather than the more abstract level - furniture, animals, etc - or the more specific - paperback novels, deckchairs, Dalmatians, Felix the cat. Children seem to learn these mid-level terms first, and my instinct is that as taxonomists it is typically the middle levels of granularity that are the most troublesome.

Lakoff uses such experimental evidence to argue against objectivism and in favour of “experiential realism” (or “experientialism”) - that our conceptual systems, including the way we form categories - come from our physical bodies and the social and physical environment we find ourselves experiencing. Truth, categories, knowledge, are not “out there” for us to perceive, but are generated from within our subjective experience. (This means that there is no “right” taxonomy for anything - there are only taxonomies that work in particular contexts.)

There’s more detail in this summary and in Donna Mauer’s presentation on the book.

It also has its detractors - this is one critique that I am still working my way through.

A research paper on web search, which argues that use of websites is not always informational in the classic information retreival sense. A web user may simply be navigating or attempting some sort of transaction, such as shopping. The author, Andrei Broder, worked at Alta Vista and then IBM.

Pace layering in ia is a paper by D. Grant Campbell and Karl V. Fast from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario. They bring pace layering theories from ecology and environmental science into information architecture, viewing ia as an “ecology”. Basically, ecologists have noted that events occurring over different timescales interact to affect an environment - something like the lowering of the water table would be a slow event, but a flash flood would be a fast event. Only by looking at the ways these differently “paced layers” interact, can you predict how the local environment will respond. They propose that the underlying ia of website, with taxonomies and embedded nvigation structures etc., is a slow layer but that folksonomies bubble away as a fast layer of the site, changing rapidly and responding quickly. They suggest that the most stable structure will be one that can accommodate both fast-moving and slow-moving layers and that the slow layer must be robust and flexible enough to adjust itself to pressures from the fast layer.

I don’t think I have grasped all the implications of this, but my first impression is that it fits well with the “best of both worlds” approach - encouraging social tagging but not relying on it for critical information management, while using the folksonomic tags as feedback for updating and reviewing taxonomies.

Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age was well worth a read (the link is to a serious review). I found it a bit hard going to start with (but I’d always rather be challenged than patronised) probably because it began with a scholarly overview of concepts of culture. I enjoyed the interesting juxtapositions, such as the way the concept of text as artefact has changed since medieval times and how the idea of text as a performance is returning in the online arena. With chapters looking at the effect of the cyber revolution on notions of knowledge, authority, power, memory, and identity, it posed lots of challenging questions and highlighted some new ways of examining the cultural, political and psychological effects of the digital age.

The ISKO event at UCL on Thursday was fascinating. It was a real treat to hear the eminent Brian Vickery summarise the last 75 years of information retrieval developments, setting out the key questions to be answered and the challenges still to be overcome. At 90 years old he has a unique overview, having been a key member of the Classification Research Group and director of SLAIS. He pointed out that most retrieval systems have a particular user community in mind and that this affects the choice of information collected as well as the way the collection is structured. He also argued that being accepted as part of a specialist community involves use of the specialist terminology. I am very interested in the reverse of this - that lack of access to the “rght” terminology is exclusionary. It’s all about shibboleths! He said that key questions at the moment include - whether the costs and effort of building expensive retrieval systems like taxonomies are justified, whether the need for harmonisation is increasing, what is the future for general ontologies, and what needs to be done to improve statistical retrieval systems.

Stephen Robertson from Microsoft Research, who developed search algorithms that still power most of the big search engines today, talked about the TREC competition, which has almost always been won by statistically based searches. He drew a distinction between general purpose search and specialised search for highly specific contexts - such as individual organisations - adding that in general specialist search is lagging behind. He also said that we need to find ways of feeding other sources of knowledge - such as taxonomies - into statistical searching because only by yoking the power of both will we get marked improvements.

Ian Rowlands then talked about the much publicised JISC survey on the “Google generation” concluding that they are much the same as other generations. In all age groups about 20% are expert users of technology and 20% technophobes, with everyone else muddling along in the middle. The JISC project team observed that some people spend a long time looking at online navigation systems, sometimes without accessing any articles at all. It is hard to know whether this counts as success or failure. I can think of scenarios either way - often I just want to know what’s there and will return later, sometimes it means I can rule out a source as useless (which might be a good thing if it has saved me the time of reading through irrelevant articles or might be a bad thing if it means I can’t find what I need).

There was then a very interesting discussion in which people expressed concerns about information overload and the way that students find it hard to distinguish between authoritative and trivial sources. Ian lamented the fact that online you don’t have the visual clues that you had in physical libraries - big chunky leather bound books have an obvious “weight” and authority. Personally, I wonder how much this has been driven by the desire of publishers and teachers to make educational resources “fun”. If all your text books look like adverts and all your online learning resources look like pop videos, how are you going to learn which is which? It is perfectly possible to have an authoritative online style and publishers will produce it if that is what sells best. Throughout my career I have urged “authoritativeness” in design and been told by marketing departments that it isn’t what parents, teachers and kids want - they’ll only buy it if it looks flashy and fluffy! Another issue is the lack of a canon in a post-modern world - but that’s another story!

Language and Social Identity is a collection of fascinating sociolinguistic papers. Dealing with gender and ethnicity, the researchers seek to show how stereotypes often arise from simple linguistic misunderstandings. For example, one paper argues that speakers of Indian English tend to use pronouns, conjunctions, and intonation very differently to speakers of UK English. UK speakers typically fail to pick up on the Indian English speakers’ cues and assume that what they are saying is confused or incoherent. Conversely, Indian English speakers think the UK English speakers must be either daft or extremely patronising because of their apparent failure to understand very simple logic. Another paper claims that men and women typically use utterances like “mm hmm” to mean different things. Women mean simply “I’m listening”, whereas men mean emphatically “I agree”. Men then think that women keep changing their minds and women think men just aren’t listening!

The most relevant paper from a taxonomic point of view was one on the highly charged political nature of language use in Montreal. The need to cut across language differences and negotiate norms of communication when diverse groups feel they have something to lose through compromise mirrors the inter-departmental language mediation that usually needs to happen in taxonomy projects.

7th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries is taking place in Aarhus in September. Topics of contributions include:

* Concepts of Digital Libraries and digital content
* Collection building, management and integration
* System architectures, integration and interoperability
* Information organisation, search and usage
* Multilingual information access and multimedia content management
* User interfaces for digital libraries
* User studies and system evaluation
* Digital archiving and preservation: methodological, technical and legal issues
* Digital Library applications in e-science, e-learning, e-government, cultural heritage, etc.
* Web 2.0 and associated technologies

The International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2008 is taking place in Berlin in September on the intersection between NKOS and metadata, especially the main topic of the conference: Metadata for Semantic and Social Applications.

There is an NKOS events 2008 Wiki with details about what will be discussed, with the option to contribute.