ebyblog students and information

Some Quickies for July 13 2007

Folksonomy Provides 70 Percent More Terms Than Taxonomy

A short article on a study on how many terms users added versus the controlled vocabulary chosen for pieces of art. The discussion centers around the findability of items where 70% of the terms people use are not present. Usually the debate in libraries revolves around the noise or organization issue and seems to ignore the findability. Controlled vocabularies will always have their place, especially in inventory control. But for search and finding aids, folksonomy may play an important role.

But, what organization is comfortable with that level of inefficiency at the low end? What about 70 percent of an organizations information, documents, and media not being easily found by how people think of it?

Mashing up Microformats

I was referring to the danger of there being a microformat for everything. As has been said many times, if in two or three years there are hundreds of microformats then we will have failed.

If you don’t already follow Adactio I recommend doing so, especially if you have interest in social and/or semantic web stuff including microformats. He goes over solving issues with existing microformats with the example of death date which vcard doesn’t have. Instead of adding a field he uses hcalendar instead for the dates. I’ve been thinking of possibilities for catalog screens using hcard and hreview until a hcite comes around. I think the hcard and hreview would probably catch most of it.

Your bank has a REST API now

Wesabe is a site i like alot. You upload your financial data and then tag, edit and rate things. There are community contributed tips that match up with vendors and tags which are quite helpful. They now have a REST API for the data you upload (which can be automatic) which means you really have an API to all of your financial data which could be a boon. I haven’t had time to play with it but I think there will probably be some cool applications coming out.

Libraries and the Network

Casey has a good post about libraries not taking advantage of the network. I’m still a bit unpleased most consortia don’t have a web-service that would allow local catalogs to include results. Screen scraping sucks and the consortia probably loses half its usefulness by not having it.

In libraries, this applies equally well to both our systems and data. We recognize now that our data is living and evolving, but synchronizing available record enhancements with individual collections remains costly and laborious. Without efficient mechanisms to share improvements, the value to any one library of trying to share what local improvements or corrections they make is limited, preventing libraries from benefiting from the network in ways that open source software development has.

OAI-PMH vs Atom vs Sitemaps

A short post on how atom may be a better format for keeping track of updates in a repository. I also have the Restful Web Services book but have yet to start it.

Filling the AtomPub AAA Void

Authentication, Authorization and Accounting, or “triple A”, are key requirements for enterprise applications and if Web 2.0 apps are to succeed behind the firewall they too must integrate within the hairball that is the enterprise. The Atom syndication server backed by the OpenDS LDAP server cleanly address the issues and here’s how

A continuing blog post series on using OpenDS with Atom that looks like an interesting set-up. If you’ve been following APP you might want to take a look.

What is a Citation

An speaking of hcite, Darcusblog has a nice post on citations with some helpful diagrams for anyone working on such a thing.

Have a look at http://iNeedSomebody2tag.com/welcome/en. There is a web experiment regarding to folksonomies and collaborative tagging systems.

Maybe it is of interest for you.

Regards,
Tobias Kowatsch

Very intersting article about folksonomy, thanks. But I’m curious, what role do you think controlled topic/form/genre vocab has in inventory control? I can’t really think of anything too too significant.

I think both controlled vocab AND folksonomy will have a role in discovery and findability. Especially in visual images, folksonmy has a particularly useful role. Since visual resources don’t come with very much of their own inherent text (compared with textual resources), the value of any added textual metadata at all, even controlled, is especially large.

Argh, I mean “the value of any added textual metadata at all, even UNCONTROLLED…“

And I should also comment that controlled vocabularly still has it’s own unique roles in discovery that I don’t think folksonomy can play very well. One is in relationships, and allowing the user to easily narrow or broaden their search, in response to system feedback. (That most of our systems don’t do a good job of this doesn’t help us recognized that controlled vocab CAN. But it can. The facetted interfaces we are starting to see start to).

What I was referring to in the inventory mention is the idea that you need a hierarchy system when you have physical shelves that people browse compared to an entirely online system where you might not need that information. I agree that you will likely need at least some categories to help in the finding of material but as the article describes you may be missing a large chunk. I actually believe there is a chapter in the Long Tail book about taxonomies and online only vs shelves.

In short I agree with you with the caveat that the terms people use to describe items are likely different then the approved subject headings in many situations.