VocabControl

The Cleverest Thing That Never Existed. The author - Charlie Hull - doesn’t hold out much hope for the semantic web! Dismissing semantic web technologies as marketing spin, he argues that existing search engines are already searching “semantically” (he is himself a producer of search technologies at Lemur) and can provide cheaper and easier KO solutions.

People Finder: Searching Without Logic? a step by step guide to improving findability in simple searches, by gathering errors and using them effectively as synonyms behind the search.

A Journey In Social Media: A Breakthrough In Taxonomy? A discusssion of the pros and cons of folksonomies and taxonomies, with the debate categorised as being between the traditionalists and the emergents. The writer is at a large company and promises updates on the taxo/folkso divide there.

The Taxonomy Guide - Bibliography is a collection of core taxonomy reference materials, compiled by the University of Toronto.

I had a look at the new knol offering from Google and found this: Impact of Social Network Analysis Theory In Strengthening Diversity In Modern Organizations. There is no biography of the author, Osman Masahudu Gunu, but he is described as an accountant in the US and has contributed several knols.

I was lucky enough to get myself introduced very briefly to Seth Earley at the Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy conference in March. He suggested I look into Social Network Theory in relation to taxonomies, as a knowledge organisation tool aimed at a specific group. This knol seemed like a good bullet point introduction with some useful references.

I have just returned from the 10th International ISKO conference in Montreal, which was four days of excellent KO presentations. The pre-conference workshop was on SKOS and the conference itself included around 50 papers and a poster session. Some of my favourites were Knowledge and Trust in Epistemology and Social Software by Judith Simon, a Survey of the Top-level Categories in the Structure of Corporate Websites by Abdus Sattar Chaudhry, Deliberate Bias in Knowledge Organisation by Birger Hjorland, and Social Tagging and Communities of Practice by Edward Corrado and Heather Moulaison.

I’ll be writing up my conference notes and posting them here over the weekend.

Unit Structures: Information Budgets and Shared Cognition an interesting post about “Twitter overload”.

The Taxonomy Tango discusses a multi-taxonomy management method and tool invented by Mobile Content Networks. “People are just getting comfortable with their own taxonomies and now they are realizing the world is full of taxonomies”, MCN CTO Phyllis Reuther is quoted as saying.

“MCN Query Broker and Taxonomy Engine enables MobileSearch.net to make real-time queries to any number of relevant content sources, return results from those sources, and then group, sort, and rank results according to advanced algorithms and partner rules”, according to the MCN website.

It would be interesting to know more about the rules that power this. MCN provide some pretty diagrams, which say things like it classifies, it sorts, but only question marks where the “magic ” happens!