Category Archives: Ontologies

Some things read this week, 20 – 26 April 2008

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Sunday – Thursday, 20 – 24 Apr 2008

Lodge, David. 1992. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. New York: Penguin Books.

Wasn’t sure if I was going to continue this but I read it on and off on Sunday and made a big dent at dinner in the Alley on Monday. I’m 66% of the way through so I imagine I’ll finish it and then shift back to more serious things.

Finished this Thursday afternoon. I guess it was OK as it had some moments but I can’t recommend it overall.

Wednesday, 23 Apr 2008

2007. Running & Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind. Malden: Blackwell Pub.

  • Ch. 17 : “Where the Dark Feelings Hold Sway”: Running as Aesthetic Experience by Martha Nussbaum
  • Ch. 18 : The Power of Passion on Heartbreak Hill by Michelle Maiese.

Only one chapter left to go. Good book.

Friday – Saturday, 25 – 26 Apr 2008

Guarino, Nicola and Christopher A. Welty. “An Overview of OntoClean.” In Staab, Steffen, and Rudi Studer, ed. 2004. Handbook on Ontologies. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Actually a fairly good article, but I have major concerns over their explanation of rigidity. It has certainly been a bit since I last read Kripke or any other relevant literature on rigidity … but they blow it in their explanation, IMHO.

I think they have it right in the end. But. Their presentation is confused. They use a highly questionable example and then make several implicit assumptions in its use and description. It might actually work if they spelled out all of their assumptions but there must be better examples.

I ran it by one or two people and would read a sentence and they’d say, “See, they’re assuming such and such and they are right.” Then I’d read the next sentence where the assumption seems to be reversed and they went, “Oh!”

Lest you think this is nit-picking—it may be but I do not think so—I also have the same complaints about many of the examples used in the cataloging and classification literature. These examples are critical. Many of these concepts are extremely difficult and nuanced. Crystal clear and meaningful examples are a must. Also, in today’s world, quit with the culturally-specific examples. I fully realize that The Wizard of Oz is fairly international by this point. I also realize that there may be few to no fully international examples available, but with a little care I do think excellent examples could be found for anyone who might be reading this kind of literature in the first place.

Recommend. But read carefully.

Saturday, 26 Apr 2008

Frohmann, Bernd. 2008. Subjectivity and information ethics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, no. 2:267-277. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20742 (Accessed March 2, 2008).

Recommended if you are into information ethics at all.

Some things read this week, 30 March – 5 April 2008

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Note: Not that it matters to anyone but me but my chronology may be a bit off due to Comcast pretty much taking over my life for most of this week and the end of the last one.

Sunday – Thursday, 30 Mar – 3 Apr 2008

Budd, J. (2008). Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. , 281. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited.

Read ch. 2 Place and Identity (Sun.?) and began ch. 3 Being Informed about Informing (Thu).

For anyone interested in the current debates about the profession/”just who is a librarian?” there is a decent discussion in ch. 2 of this topic, along with one on LIS education. Not saying I fully agree with Budd on either, but he makes some good points on both heads.

Monday – Friday, 31 Mar – 4 Apr 2008

Critchley, S. (2001). Continental philosophy : a very short introduction, Very short introductions, 43. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

This is an excellent introduction to the split between Continental and Anglo-American (or analytic) philosophy, along with why it needs to be eradicated and some ways to work towards a reconciliation.

The primary reason for the split is the professionalization of the discipline and self-identification by said professionals. Hmmm. Sounds kind of familiar. Sadly.

Highly recommended.

Wednesday – Thursday, 2 – 3 Apr 2008Dousa, Thomas. (2008) Subject Heading Specificity with Especial Reference to LCSH: A Basic Bibliography.

Tom has produced an excellent annotated bibliography for his 3rd assignment in 590SA (Subject access & subject analysis).

Friday, 4 Apr 2008

Budd, J. (1992). The Library and Its Users: The Communication Process. , Contributions in librarianship and information science., 71, 193. New York: Greenwood Press.

Grabbed this because Budd cited it in ch. 3 of Self-Examination. “As one would suspect, the literature on communication is voluminous. That literature will not be covered in great depth here; elsewhere I (Budd, 1992) have examined it in some detail” (79).

Now that was interesting to know, so I grabbed it the next day as quickly as I could. And I might, in fact, read this one first and then go back to Self-Examination.

I need to know about these texts. There is another one Pauline told me about that used to be a textbook, at least 4 editions. I picked up all 4, which we had. It seems our profession goes through cycles in the (mostly) lip service paid to our being in the business of communicating.

Read the Introduction and ch. 1 Libraries, Information, and Meaning at lunch.

As I suspected, and complained about last week, Budd does not make the same mistake here re the need for language for the possibility of communication.

Saturday, 5 Apr 2008

Library of Congress. (1951). Subject Headings: A Practical Guide. , 140. Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office.

Read parts of this for Tom’s presentation/discussion of his project this coming Tuesday (see the bibliography above).

Svenonius, E. (1976). Metcalf and the principles of specific entry. In W. B. Rayward (Ed.), The Variety of Librarianship: Essays in Honour of John Wallace Metcalfe (pp. 171-189). Sandy Bay, Tas: Library Association of Australia.

Same as above. Recommended.

Web Ontology Language: OWL (ch. 4 of a soon-to-be published book on the Semantic Web from MIT Press, I believe. Handed out in class last week.)

For 590OD. Good stuff to know, to say the least. But it just feeds my beliefs that the Semantic Web will not save the world despite what Sir Tim and others might think. There is actually so little of importance that can be modeled using First Order Logic, or, should I say, there is so much more of importance than what can be modeled by FOL.

In fact, I believe they even blow one of their examples. I may have to go to class on Tuesday just to find out. Or else I’ll simply talk to Allen or Karen about it

Some things read this week, 27 January – 2 February 2008

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Sunday, 27 Jan 2008

Nonmonotonic Logic. Leora Morgenstern. MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.

Suggested by fellow classmate Tom Dousha for additional elucidation for Ontologies Development. Highly understandable resource for non-experts in logic, although having a basic grasp probably helps.

Sunday – Wednesday, 27 – 30 Jan 2008

Harris, Roy, and International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication. 2006. Integrationist Notes and Papers : 2003-2005. Crediton, Devon, England: Tree Tongue http://www.librarything.com/work/details/26156294 (Accessed January 26, 2008). Discover UIUC Full Text
[more info here] [WorldCat]

  • 6 : Synchrony and Diachrony
  • 7 : Integrationism and Philosophy of Language
  • 8 : On Determinancy of Linguistic Form
  • 9 : Integrationism and Arbitrariness (Tue)
  • 10 : Integrationism and Etymology (Tue)
  • 11 : Signs and Stories (Tue)
  • 12 : Meaning and Experience (Tue)
  • 13 : On Holistic Models of Language (Wed)
  • 14 : Integrationism and the Foundations of Mathematics (Wed)
  • 15 : Integrationism and Godspeak (Wed)

I believe this is the 1st book I have finished this year.

Thursday, 31 Jan 2008

Markey, Karen. Users & Uses of Bibliographic Data. [paper presented in lieu of her attendance at the 1st LC Working Group Meeting, March 8, 2007]

This is a very interesting statement that ought to be taken seriously. Once we see the data in the forthcoming article: Markey, Karen. In press. 25 years of research on end-user searching. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology.

One should check … actually it was published in two parts in JASIST 58(8), June 2007: 1071-1081 and 1123-1130.

Markey, Karen. (2007) Twenty-five years of searching, Part 1: Research findings.

Markey, Karen. (2007) Twenty-five years of searching, Part 2: Future research directions.

Downloaded the pdfs and imported the data into Zotero. Will need to read them soon.

Looks like Wiley-Interscience is making some improvements on the ASIST Digital Library. Whoever is responsible, thank you.

Friday – Saturday, 1 – 2 Feb 2008

Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum. Discover UIUC Full Text

Re-read Chap. 6 : Mathematics and the language of science

Another rather light week as I was trying to finish my Harris and Hjørland bibliography and essay by Thursday. I did make this deadline thankfully. In the end, neither are what I was particularly envisioning. They really area far cry from what I thought I was aiming for; which leaves me quite ambivalent about it.

I most certainly did not give “just a school assignment” to Dr. Krummel as one simply does not do such things. But in some ways it does seem as if I am far closer to that end of the spectrum than what I wanted to be.

Thus, I don’t know if or when I will post any of it. I have a hard time imagining anyone would actually be very interested in any of it. This is not to say that I think no one should be interested in the topic, whether or not they care what I might have to say about it, but that I just don’t think that many are. If you truly do care I will happily email you the 2 small Word docs. By the way, at 1097 words the essay is far shorter than many of my blog posts. The bibliography has 34 entries in the final count, I believe; there could have been so many more. It is a tad over 13 pages and is 4115 words. Both are definitely much shorter than my natural bent.

But. It is done. So it is time to move forward now.

Today [Sunday, 3 Feb] is the 3rd day of Birthday Month. This year’s Birthday Month—which I intend to attempt to celebrate to the max—is off to a good start. It was welcomed in with a decent snow storm on the 31st-1st; I am a Midwestern, mid-Winter baby so one must have a decent winter storm once during Birthday Month.

There has been a couple decent movies this weekend after finishing the bibliography stuff. I watched Balls of Fury which is pretty good as a ping pong cum-kung fu movie. I also watched Once but I am really ambivalent about the movie. I am better disposed to it after watching all of the extras, but extras should not determine what we think of a movie and perhaps only deepen our understanding and/or appreciation of it.

One that I will highly recommend, though, is the French movie, Blame it on Fidel! This was an very good movie and the kids who star in this movie are simply incredible. Watch the extras and this feeling can only deepen. There is a pretty good description at IMDB but I think it also contains a spoiler about the end of the movie. Perhaps it is not a major spoiler but I certainly am glad I hadn’t read it before watching the movie. Highly recommended.

Some things read this week, 25 November – 1 December 2007

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NOTE: CommentPress version of LC Working Group Draft Final Report needed

Please see last entry. We really need a CommentPress install of the LC Working Group’s Draft Final Report. Can anyone do this service quickly?

Sunday – Tuesday, 25 – 27 Nov

Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1987.

  • Ch. 5: Language, listening, and commitment
  • Ch. 6: Towards a new orientation
  • Ch. 7: Computers and representation
  • Ch. 8: Computation and intelligence (Mon)
  • Ch. 9: Understanding language (Mon)
  • Ch. 10: Current directions in artificial intelligence (Tue)
  • Ch. 11: Management and conversation (Tue)
  • Ch. 12: Using computers: A direction for design

A very interesting book that is frequently recommended by Hjørland in his writings.

This is at least the 24th book I have read so far this year. I have also re-read 3 of these 24 for a 2nd time this year, too, i.e., read 3 of them 2x this year. I have (at least) 5 more that are in various states of being finished. This is a lot more books than last year, which I am happy about, but it also means that I have read fewer articles. Trade-offs are plentiful in life.

Sunday – Wednesday, 25 – 28 Nov

Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

  • Ch. 4: Hypermodernism (Sun)
  • Ch. 5: Postmodern Realism (Wed)

This book has done a lot to change my views on postmodernism. I still do not like the word at all, but this book contains some good ideas on how to overcome the postmodern condition, how to move forward positively as a society as we recover from the failures of the modern project.

Sunday, 25 Nov

Hjørland, Birger. Read half a dozen or so book reviews, encyclopedia articles and letters to the editor.

Tuesday, 27 Nov

Harel, David. Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can’t Do. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. [for LIS452]

  • Ch. 2: Sometimes we can’t do it

Hjørland, Birger. “Documents, Memory Institutions and Information Science.” Journal of Documentation 56.1 (2000): 27-41. 14 September 2007.

Stewart, Todd. “Topical Epistemologies.” Metaphilosophy 38(1), January 2007: 23-43.

This was mentioned in the list of faculty publications in the ISU Philosophy Dept. Alumni Newsletter Fall 2007 that I received today. I thought perhaps it might have something to add to the epistemological work that Hjørland recommends so highly for our field; which I agree with. I’m not sure though. Todd is focusing on something different than most of the epistemological work we need to do as librarians; although, it might well apply to the work we need to do within our own field.

…when we engage in the study of a topical epistemology what is called for is the application of our best analyses of epistemic concepts to specific subjects or, alternatively, the development of a substantive rather than a conceptual account of whether and why it is that beliefs about a specific topic are justified or unjustified. What is called for is an explanation of whether and why it is that beliefs about a particular topic are actually or possibly justified or unjustified (24-25).

An interesting issue, which I cannot address here, is that the development of a topical epistemology may be rather fruitless prior to some sort of an agreement about the correct semantic or ontological analysis of concepts or objects as they apply to a topic… (26). [Amen!!]

If you believe in the epistemological project of librarianship as much as Hjørland, myself and, hopefully, others you may find this an interesting read. Again, I see it as more applicable applied to the topics within our own field where we are allowed to, and should, pass judgement on the epistemological status of our beliefs.

Metaphilosophy was available online via the UIUC ORR. While perusing the 2007 issues of Metaphilosophy online I also found a few more interesting looking articles, including one on “intelligent collegiate depression” (ICD) that I will definitely be reading and reporting on.

Wednesday, 28 Nov

Harris, Roy. “The Semiology of Textualization.” In Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. 1st ed, Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1998: 227-240.

(Re-)Read another article for the 3rd time. Walrod one from MDRT.

Thursday, 29 Nov

Double, Richard. “Value and Intelligent Collegiate Depression.” Metaphilosophy 38(1), January 2007: 111-121.

American universities can be unhappy, alienating places for many students who are brighter, more sensitive, or less conformist than most of their peers (opening sentence, 111).

This one is pretty good, although I was hoping for a bit more somehow. I do think the author has a pretty good grasp of the depressive mind. I think his reply to “The Immensity of the Cosmos Objection” is pretty faulty, though. Luckily I don’t use that one myself.

If you are interested in what might well be termed “rational” responses to depression—or more generally—then please do check out this article. Do not let the journal title put you off at all; it is actually quite accessible.

Bibliographic Ontology Specification – found via this post on CSL at darcusblog. Hmmm. Interesting. I was looking at some of this stuff back in Spring 2006. I really need to learn more about RDF and be more serious about this kind of thing.

Friday – Saturday, 30 Nov – 1 Dec

LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Draft Final Report.

Since I was moving so slowly (and late) Friday morning I was able to go by GSLIS and print this nicely and double-sided automatically. Started reading it at my late lunch. Read the Letter from the Working Group on the bus ride in around noon.

Read more tonight.

I have a few comments and questions, but I am liking much of what I’m reading. About halfway through it.

What we really need is a CommentPress installation of this. I really wish I could do this now, but no way possible.

I’m thinking the report must be in the public domain. LC produced. No markings on report page or report itself. If my assumption is correct then it should be allowable to do so.

I see from a comment on the Installation page by Ben Vershbow that one still needs to have a WP 2.2 install, not 2.3 yet. A comment by on paragraph 2 on 6 Nov says so.

It would so rock if someone could get the report (rapidly) into a CommentPress install. Comments are due on/before 15 December. Two weeks. Not much time.

But think of the value and it could be—should be—archived.

Anyone willing? And can. I’m willing but cannot possibly in the time before comments are due. :(

I really need to work with Blake (cause he rocks) and get myself a CommentPress install, but as a 2nd “blog.” There’s a couple of things that can (and should) be done. I may not be the proper one but someone must get things started. That’s for the future, though, whenever that arrives.

Some things read this week, 28 October – 3 November 2007

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Sunday, 28 Oct

Davis, Hayley, and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. Redefining Linguistics. London: Routledge, 1990.

  • Ch. 4: Talbot J. Taylor. Normativity and Linguistic Form. (Sat-Sun)
  • Ch.5: Paul Hopper. The Emergence of the Category ‘Proper Name’ in Discourse. (Sun)

The Taylor chapter was particularly excellent.

Zwicky, Arnold M. and Ann D. Zwicky. “Register as a Dimension of Linguistic Variation.” In Kittredge and Lehrberger, Eds. Sublanguage: Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domains. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1982: 213-218.

Harris, Roy. The Language-makers. London: Duckworth, 1980. [Re-reading]

  • Ch. 1.
  • Ch. 2

Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. 1st ed, Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1998.

  • Ch. 5: Toolan, Michael. A Few Words on Telementation.

Monday, 29 Oct

Hampsher-Monk, Iain, Karin Tilmans, and Frank van Vree, Eds. History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998.

  • Intro: Iain Hampsher Monk. Karin Tilmans and Frank van Vree. “A Comparative Perspective on Conceptual History – An Introduction.”
  • Ch. 1: Pim den Boer. “The Historiography of German Begriffsgeschichte and the Dutch Project of Conceptual History.”
  • Ch. 2: Reinhart Koselleck. “Social History and Begriffsgeschichte.

Downey, et. al. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, 2nd ed. [For LIS452]

  • Ch. 17: Linked lists
  • Ch. 18: Stacks
  • Ch. 19: Queues
  • Ch. 20: Trees

Harris and Wolf, Eds. See above.

  • Ch. 6: Harris, Roy. The Dialect Myth.
  • Ch. 7: Love, Nigel. Integrating Languages.

The Love was highly similar to his other article I read last week, The Locus of Languages in a Redefined Linguistics. In fact, whole paragraphs were the same as was the gist of the argument. If I were to recommend one over the other it would be one I just read. It is shorter and perhaps even clearer.

Tuesday, 30 Oct

History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. See above.

  • Ch. 3: Iain Hampsher-Monk. Speech Acts, Languages or Conceptual History?

Harris and Wolf, Eds. See above.

  • Ch. 11: Farrow, Steve. Irony and Theories of Meaning.
  • Ch. 12: Taylor, Talbot J. Conversational Utterances and Sentences

Wednesday, 31 Oct

History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. See above.

  • Ch. 4: Hans Erich Bödeker. Concept — Meaning — Discourse. Begriffsgeschichte Reconsidered.

I’ve read 4 chapters of this book now and I’m still not really any closer to understanding what Begriffsgeschichte is. Perhaps reading one of the chapters that are supposedly examples will help. I’m not sure why I’m not getting it. Much of the writing is not very clear but then most has been translated into English also.

I only have the book for a few more days. I’ll have another look at the intro and see what I perhaps ought to read next that might help. Then I think I’ll copy 2 or 3 of the chapters I’ve already read for re-reading in the future. It seems as if something is important here but I’m not getting it right now. I’m also feeling ill again, so maybe it’s just my stupid brain not dealing with it as it should.

Harris and Wolf, Eds. See above.

  • Ch. 13: Taylor, Talbot J. Do You Understand? Criteria of Understanding in Verbal Interaction.

Thursday, Nov 1

History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. See above.

  • Ch. 6: Terence Ball. Conceptual History and the History of Political Thought.

López-Huertas, María J. Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Organization for the 21st Century. Integration of Knowledge across Boundaries. Proceedings of the Seventh International ISKO Conference, 10-13 July 2002, Granada, Spain. Advances in Knowledge Organization, 8 (2002).

  • Poli, Roberto. “Framing Information.” pp. 225-231.
  • Smith, Terence R., Marcia Lei Zeng and ADEPT Knowledge Organization Team. “Structured Models of Scientific Concepts for Organizing, Accessing, and Using Learning Materials.” pp. 232-239.
  • Carlyle, Allyson and Lisa M. Fusco. “Equivalence in Tillett’s Bibliographic Relationships Taxonomy: A Revision.” pp. 258-263.
  • Mai, Jens-Erik. “Is Classification Theory Possible? Rethinking Classification Reserach.” pp. 472-478.

Poli – hard to say from such a short overview but I don’t think I’m agreeing with some of his ontological thinking and/or his relationships.

Smith, et. al. – sounds very interesting but would like to see more examples.

Carlyle and Fusco – “He laughed, he cheered, he cried.” I wanted to like this paper. They point out an issue with Tillett’s original methodology, which is there to be recognized if one only reads her dissertation. And while this is an issue of method, I do not know that it really impinges much on her results. Validity of the results would be strengthened if she had done it as pointed out, but would they be different?

The aim of the revision [which is a small part of a larger revisiting of Tillett's relationships by the authors and David M. Levy] is to suggest “that equivalence be determined syntagmatically; that is, that it be defined relative to the use of documents” (260).

They spend a fair amount of space showing that the substitutability of one document for another is context dependent; that is, based on the user’s context. I fully agree that this is the case. Sometimes edition is irrelevant to the user. It is possible that one book by an author is as good as any other by the same author for the user. These are just a few possible examples. But then they just forget about the importance of context dependency.

Equivalence relationships hold among document representations in which one or more document properties described in the representations are shared (262).

First off, that should be “ER potentially hold ….” Even then it is still too broad. And did you notice that they are talking about the equivalence of document representations and not of documents. I’ll let you read the article and figure that bit out for yourself.

While we ought to have a concept of the equivalence relationships between document representations—is that simple DC record equivalent to that full MARC record and is it equivalent to that full VRA Core record for that Corinthian amphora?—this paper is talking about the documents (broadly construed) that users want to retrieve and use based on their interactions with library catalogs and other knowledge organization tools.

And while information professional are users too, and while document surrogates are also used, this is not the type of use being primarily discussed in this article. Thus, who cares whether there are equivalence relationships between “document representations?”

Thus, their proposal to subsume Tillett’s shared characteristics relationship under the equivalence relationship is both hasty and ill-advised. It is the case that only sometimes—that is in some contexts—can documents with shared characteristics be said to be equivalent.

And I doubt that there is ever a real user’s case that would include “the movie Scrooged, based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and the children’s picture book produced by Disney, Mickey’s Christmas Carol” (262) as equivalent documents! And even in the rare case that there was they could only be said to be so in that specific user’s context.

Considering that some of the potential shared characteristics that Tillett lists include color and size of binding, date of publication, country of publication, language, format or media (*, 27) how often are these going to truly be equivalence relationships in an actual context of use? Sure, I can dream up a context for each of them. That is not the point. The point is that items are only equivalent in the context of a user’s need and desires in that situation.

“Please Mr. Librarian, may I please have a blue book?” [I am well acquainted with patrons asking for a book by its color. But in every instance that I have ever heard of it is a specific book they are looking for and not just any book of that color.]

The overhasty subsumption of Tillett’s shared characteristics relationship under the relationship of equivalence is not a good move.

Seeing as this article is a couple of years old now I’ll have to see if I can track down anymore on their larger project of revising Tillett’s bibliographic relationships. In my spare time, of course. :(

* See Tillett, B. B., “Bibliographic Relationships.” In Bean & Green, Eds. Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge, 2001.

Mai – poorly edited, some bad paragraph transitions, thus hard to follow the argument at times. Perhaps a result of the format of these short articles which are, in effect, synopses of presentations and not entire “paper.” In the end, I’m pretty sure that I concur with the conclusions, which are coherently presented.

Florén, Celia. “The language of the mind: the mental discourse of the characters in Middlemarch.” In Inchaurralde, Carlos (Ed.) Perspectives on Semantics and Specialised Languages. Universidad de Zaragoza, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, 1994: 185-195.

Friday, 2 Nov

History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. See above.

  • Ch. 7: Bernhard F. Scholz. Conceptual History in Context: Reconstructing the Terminology of an Academic Discipline. [Fri.-Sat.]

ISKO 7 / AKO 8

  • Fernández-Molina, J. Carlos and J. August0 C. Guimarães. “Ethical Aspects of Knowledge Organization and Representation in the Digital Environment: Their Articulation in Professional Codes of Ethics.” pp. 487-492.
  • Anderson, Jack. “Ascribing Cognitive Authority to Scholarly Documents. On the (Possible) Role of Knowledge Organizations in Scholarly Communication.” pp. 28-37.

Saturday, 3 Nov

ISKO 7 / AKO 8

  • Priss, Uta. “Alternatives to the “Semantic Web”: Multi-Strategy Knowledge Representation.” pp. 305-310.
  • García Gutiérrez, Antonio. “Knowledge Organization from a “Culture of the Border”: Towards a Transcultural Ethics of Mediation.” pp. 516-522.
  • Nair Yumiko Kobashi, Johanna W. Smit and M. de Fátima G. M. Tálamo. “Constitution of the Scientific Domain of Information Science.” pp. 80-85.

Priss reviews the successes and failures of AI and NLP as an attempt to determine what the Semantic Web might actually be able to do. Suggests that failures to date are due to the fact that these methods have failed to combine associative and formal structures. Seeing as Semantic Web structures are entirely formal (as of 2002 anyway), what are the prospects?

García Gutiérrez – much of this article is hard for me to understand. I don’t know what register or style or whatever it is mostly written in, but whatever it is is pretty much unintelligible to me. Still, I think he is saying something important. It could just be said much more simply and perhaps even shorter. The last third is fairly clear, though, and I mostly agree. It is a good reminder to us to consider other ways of viewing, categorizing, and organizing the world in mind and to construct more inclusive systems.

Luzón Marco, José. “Creative aspects of lexis in scientific discourse.” In Inchaurralde, Carlos (Ed.) Perspectives on Semantics and Specialised Languages. Universidad de Zaragoza, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, 1994: 261-273.

Shows that the “meaning of words is negotiated and liable to constant change” even in scientific discourse (261). My only gripe with this article is that there are several references missing from the reference list. This is something I am noticing more and more. It seems especially prevalent in conference papers.

Harris, Roy. The Language-makers. London: Duckworth, 1980. [Re-reading]

  • Ch. 3.
  • Ch. 4.
  • Ch. 5.

Some things read this week, 5 -11 August 2007

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Sunday, 5 Aug

Gnoli, Claudio. “Progress in synthetic classification: Towards a unique definition of concepts.” UDC Seminar: The Hague: 4-5 June 2007. Preprint of the paper published in Extensions & corrections to the UDC, 29, 2007. Available at dLIST.

Tuesday, 7 Aug

Miksa, Shawne. “You Need My Metadata: Demonstrating the Value of Library Cataloging (A Response to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control). pdf

Rest of week, read more in both:

Raber, Douglas. The Problem of Information: An Introduction to Information Science. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2003.

Bade, David W. The Theory and Practice of Bibliographic Failure, Or, Misinformation in the Information Society. City of the Red Hero [Ulaanbaatar]: Chuluunbat, 2004.

Saturday, 11 Aug

Hjørland, Birger. “Information: Objective or Subjective/Situational?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (10): 1448-1456, 2007.

An interesting article, which consists primarily of showing that the view of information put forward by Marcia Bates in two recent articles is ill-suited to LIS.

It seems JASIST is also slipping into weak editing. So far it is minor, and I hope it doesn’t go any further. [Found a bit more in the next article I read today from JASIST. :( ]

Also good in that it influenced me to track down many of its citations. Yay! I love productive sources.

I have one gripe with something Hjørland writes. Honestly, though, it is something I am noticing in lots of places lately. Raber is prolific at it, particularly in his ch. 9 on relevance. I had intended to critique that chapter but may let it go in the spirit of vacationing.

Here is the quote from Hjørland:

To say about something that it is informative means that this thing may answer a question for somebody. The informativeness is thus a relation between the question and the thing. No thing is inherently informative. To consider something information is thus always to consider it as informative in relation to some possible questions (1451, emphasis in original).

No! No! No! No!

I agree with everything in those statements except the reliance on question answering. Information does not only answer questions and may, in fact, often only generate them. It also “does” other things. Information may impact us, it affects us, it may even change us, and it can answer questions, and/or generate them.

Perhaps Hjørland only means that a post hoc conditional can be constructed along the lines of, “If P had had this question, then this information would have answered it.” These sorts of post hoc conditionals could be constructed for the other things information “does” in my view, also. But they are wrong and useless. At best, they confuse the matter as to what kind of theoretical entity information is. They are philosophical child’s play and serve no useful function in the kind of analysis we need. I am not claiming that they are not useful constructs in other situations and/or arenas.

I do not think Hjørland means this, though, as it would seem to run counter to some of the arguments I have seen him make. I also (like to) imagine that he would agree with an expanded role for information than just answering questions. Thus, despite the natural tendency to collapse nuances, and the limited space in a peer-reviewed journal article, can we please not do this when the point is to explicate the concept itself?

Raber (see above) does something similar at one point in his chapter on relevance (ch. 9):

At this point, from the perspective of a user of information, the conceptual distinction between relevance and pertinence breaks down. Information is either useful or it isn’t (186, emphasis mine).

No! No! No! I do agree with his analysis of the break down between relevance and pertinence for the user. I do not agree, though, that, even from the user’s perspective, information is either useful or not.

What possible definition of “useful” could one possibly be using that is this broad? I accept that many people think that one this broad exists; I do not think there is a useful definition of “useful” that is so broad, though. [I am well aware of what I just did, but I think I can rely on you to properly parse what I meant. Isn't language lovely?]

A second issue with using this term (and probably most others one could find) is that it immediately becomes, “Useful (or whatever) from whose perspective?” Well, we were considering it from the user’s personal perspective, so …. There is much that I would personally consider as relevant to me that I would not define as “useful.” While you might use that term, and I might also in the same sort of post hoc conditional that I critiqued above, I would use a much narrower term to describe the effect, or the relevance, of the information on or to me. Perhaps one could consider such terms synonyms from a gross perspective, but that gross conflation of terms is one I find not very relevant.

I am having a hard time finding specific examples that others might accept. [One of my weaknesses which needs addressing if I am going to continue in my analytical mode....] The best I can express my point at the moment is to say that human language and psychology are both far too complex to reduce the fact that something is relevant to some individual to its being useful to them. That is, it may be anything but useful at the time and only later come to be described as useful. Perhaps, rarely, never to be so described by the said individual. Thus, any attribution of “usefulness” is made by another, which has already been shown as irrelevant to the individual user.

My argument as to broadening information past simply answering questions applies to relevance. That is, something is relevant to us if it affects us, impacts us, or changes us, and not just if we find it useful.

I think Raber actually knows this as displayed later in the same chapter.

Given what we have discussed so far, we must now ask what difference does the use of information make to me? Am I any different after its use? Note that I need not be any better off for using information for it to be relevant. In the presentation of relevance, the only issue is whether or not the use of information will change me, my situation, or both (189, emphasis mine).

By the way, I think a large part of the issue here (above) is this use of the concept of “use.” Clearly, we can often be said to use information, but I do not think all of our interactions with information can be adequately described by this concept. It is far too general a concept and, perhaps, implies intention to use. I vehemently disagree that all of our interactions with information involve intention.

Raber adds a few pages later:

If, on the other hand, the text leads me to change anything about my thinking, i.e., it makes a difference to me, then the text becomes relevant information (191).

Hmm? So are all differences to me useful differences?

I apologize if much of this thinking seems highly confused. It is. And I do not like it. But I am (have been, really) embarking on a serious quest to understand the most fundamental concepts in our field and how they “work” in reality, that is, with real individual experiencing subjects who are situated in a social (and historical and political) context.

We, as a field and as a society, have inherited some really flawed ways of viewing many things, but most importantly, for the work we do, we have a seriously flawed view of how language is employed.

Most of our fundamental concepts, and the concepts we use to talk about them, are highly complex, and confusing. Concepts such as information, relevance, aboutness and meaning that are key to what we do in LIS are a complete mess. We generally get by using them in everyday life because the implications of (minor) differences in use have little consequence, but in our field it is different. Those difference in use have almost completely stifled our field. All of these terms have objective (and/or inter-subjective) and subjective components. The same goes for use and many of the other terms we employ when talking about our core concepts.

I am currently unable to say exactly why, but I feel (and think) that these differences in use of our core theoretical concepts are today of much greater import than they were in the not too distant professional past. Something about the interaction of people and information, how much of it is available, from many more sources, shifting notions of authority and authorship, etc. are making these conceptual issues of far greater import.

I was just finishing reading Raber’s ch. 9 and was coming to the conclusion that perhaps in LIS that it is OK to talk (primarily) about the use of information, seeing as how we are dealing primarily with recorded knowledge. I still felt that was too narrow, but that perhaps we should narrow down a bit on the types of information we are really concerned with. But Raber made me regroup.

These needs then begin as something felt rather than something thought. As of now we really don’t know how or why we become conscious of and capable of articulating needs as complex as the need for information. …

Given a human reality that is necessarily constructed from the not always knowable or predictable relations between self and others, we must grant that the final goal of information seekers may be as affective as cognitive. … To be meaningful, information science must be inclusive. It must focus its attention on a wide variety of information, information users, and information use if it is to assert a legitimate claim to be a science about all information and its users (199, emphasis in original).

So perhaps library science can retreat to explicit information use (although I do not think so), but information science a la Raber cannot! I do think information science needs to rein itself in some as to what kinds of information and information use it considers its domain (see Hjørland article above for some of the ideas that make me think this). Nonetheless, both library and information science need to consider information in its non-formally recorded modes and also its interactions with individual users in a sense broader than “use.”

Fonseca, Frederico. “The Double Role of Ontologies in Information Science Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (6): 786-793, 2007.

NASKO 2007 – an historical moment, or perhaps only a moment in time

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Last Wednesday morning I headed out for Toronto, Canada with my advisor, Kathryn La Barre, for the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, June 14-15, 2007.

The conference was Thursday afternoon and all day Friday with approximately 40 people in attendance. Big names, little names, old names, young names, academics (mostly), corporate folks, those in various middles.

At the end of the 1st day we had a business meeting at which the North American chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO-NA) was born. I do not mean to be pretentious, but this was an historic moment. I am a bit too fresh to this field to know all of the history but this moment has been a long time in coming and is long overdue.

ISKO’s Mission

Founded in 1989, ISKO is the leading international society for organization of knowledge. ISKO has a broad and interdisciplinary scope. ISKO’s mission is to advance conceptual work in knowledge organization in all kinds of forms, and for all kinds of purposes, such as databases, libraries, dictionaries and the Internet.

As an interdisciplinary society, ISKO brings together professionals from many different fields. ISKO counts more than 500 members all over the world, from fields such as information science, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, as well as special domains such as medical informatics.

In order to achieve its mission and goals, ISKO works to

    • promote research, development and applications of knowledge organization systems that advance the philosophical, psychological and semantic approaches for ordering knowledge
    • provide the means of communication and networking on knowledge organization for its members
    • function as a connecting link between all institutions and national societies, working with problems related to the conceptual organization and processing of knowledge

We were welcomed by Brian Cantwell Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. He told us that despite a hiring freeze across the university FIS was being allowed to double both the number of faculty and students.

Richard Smiraglia, Long Island University, and Chair of NASKO 2007 was the next to welcome us.

[Conference papers available at dLIST.]

Next up was Clare Beghtol as the moderator for Contributed Papers Session 1. Papers presented in this session were:

Exploring Classification as Conversation. David M. Pimentel, Syracuse University. [my pre-conference comments here.]

I think that David is on to something here. I had a nice (but short) chat with him on Day 2. He seems to have narrowed his ideas a bit from what is in the paper, which is fair. I’d like to see this progress and then would be real interested in how we conceptualize and then build systems that can implement such ideas.

Ontology and the Semantic Web. Jane Zhang, Harvard University.

Coffee break

Jens-Erik Mai as moderator of Contributed Papers Session 2:

Everything Old is New Again: Finding a Home for Knowledge Structures in a Satisficing World. D. Grant Campbell, et. al., University of Western Ontario.

This paper is about “moving” vertical files to the Semantic Web. They are working within the area of Alzheimer’s Disease and providing a question and answer system that is designed for patients, family members, care givers and doctors. On the way home I realized that this is not really very Semantic Web-like at all. I guess one could say it is minimal-level SW. I guess I’d concede that, but only with a “barely.” This is not to suggest that it is not a useful project. I do believe that it shows promise. It just isn’t all that semantic.

Beyond Retrieval: A Proposal to Expand the Design Space of Classification. Melanie Feinberg, University of Washington.

Knowledge Strategy and its Influence on Knowledge Organization. Joseph Kasten, Dowling College.

Business Meeting: Rebecca Green was elected to chair the meeting and Clare Beghtol was elected as recorder.

A short discussion ensued as to establishing a North American chapter of ISKO. This was unanimously supported.

Richard Smiraglia, Joe Tennis and Kathryn La Barre were elected to draft our by-laws, submit a formal application to ISKO and to begin the process for our next meeting in 2009.

I am seriously looking forward to being involved with this organization and I hope that it will be a long-lived one. Kathryn has my name (formally) and will help me get involved with the planning for the next conference.

Day 2 will be covered in another post. But before I forget:

I really enjoyed myself at NASKO 2007! Thank you to our hosts, the planners, the student volunteers, the presenters and all in attendance for such a wonderful time.

Some things read this week, 10 – 16 June 2007

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Possibly another light week due to all-day on campus class (Topic Maps begins) and travel to Toronto for NASKO.

Sunday, 10 Jun

Van de Sompel, Herbert and Oren Beit-Arie. “Generalizing the OpenURL Framework beyond References to Scholarly Works.” D-Lib Magazine 7 (7/8) July/August 2001.

Pepper, Steve. The TAO of Topic Maps: Finding the Way in the Age of Infoglut.

Originally read 17 Feb 2007 for 590RO Spring 2007. Re-read for 590TML Topic Maps which starts Tuesday.

If you want some non-technical insight into what Topic Maps are this is the article to read.

Campbell, D. G., Brudin, M., MacLean, G., and Baird, C. (2007). Everything old is new again: Finding a place for knowledge structures in a satisficing world. Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization. Vol. 1. Available: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1896

For NASKO 2007.

Smiraglia, R. P. (2007). Performance works: Continuing to comprehend instantiation. Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization. Vol. 1. Available: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1910

For NASKO 2007.

Kemp, R. B. (2007). Classifying marginalized people, focusing on natural disaster survivors. Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization. Vol. 1. Available: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1908

For NASKO 2007.

La Barre, K. (2007). Faceted navigation and browsing features in new OPACS: A more robust solution to problems of information seekers? (extended abstract) Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization. Vol. 1. Available: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1912

For NASKO 2007.

Zhang, J. (2007). Ontology and the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization. Vol. 1. Available: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1897

For NASKO 2007.

Monday – Tuesday, 11 – 12 Jun

Dahlberg, Ingetraut. “Knowledge Organization: A New Science?.” Knowledge Organization 33 (1), 2006: 11-19.

Cited by Smiraglia, see above.

McIlwaine, I. C. “Trends in Knowledge Organization Research.” Knowledge Organization 30 (2), 2003: 75-86.

Stumbled over while copying a different article.

Discusses the trends in research in knowledge organization for the preceding 5 years.

Wednesday – Thursday, 13 – 14 Jun

Tennis, Joesph T. “Experientialist Epistemology and Classification Theory: Embodied and Dimensional Classification.” Knowledge Organization 32 (2): 2005: 79-92.

Stumbled over while copying some of this other stuff.

It is interesting but, at least from what I keep finding, it is more conceptual work from Joe Tennis. Where are the follow on empirical studies that he lays out? Are they just left for someone else, perhaps for a grad student? I like a lot about his conceptual work over the last couple years, which includes some ideas about how to extend thesauri, this piece which actually makes use of Lakoff instead of just citing him, and so on. But all of it needs to be validated, and in several cases actually built so that it can be validated. Tennis admits that. But then seems to move on to something else. Maybe I’ll ask him about it while here in Toronto.

I did not get a chance to ask Joe about this. I could have made it perhaps, but seeing as I was having a hard time figuring out how to phrase it without sounding snarky (which is not my intent!) I just let it go.

Some things read this week, 27 May – 2 June 2007

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Note: Sorry for the non-existent annotations. It was a light week as I prepped for and then attended NASIG.

Sunday, 27 May

Harris, Roy. The Language-Makers. London: Duckworth, 1980.

Finished chap. 2.

Monday, 28 May

Harris, Roy. The Language-Makers. London: Duckworth, 1980.

Read chap. 3.

Tennis, Joseph. “SKOS and the Ontogenesis of Vocabularies.”

Cited by Harper, Corey A. and Barbara B. Tillett. “Library of Congress Controlled Vocabularies and Their Application to the Semantic Web.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 47-68 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 47-68. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_04

Vizine-Goetz, Diane. “Terminology Services: Making Knowledge Organization Schemes More Accessible to People and Computers.” [pdf] OCLC Newsletter, no. 266.

Cited by Harper, Corey A. and Barbara B. Tillett. See above for full reference.

Monday – Tuesday, 28 – 29 May

CISAC. Outline for ISO Standard ISPI (International Standard Party Identifier Code) [pdf].

Cited by Harper, Corey A. and Barbara B. Tillett. See above for full reference.

Tuesday, 29 May

Fallgren, Nancy. “Brief Meeting Summary: May 9, 2007. Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Data (Chicago, IL).”

Miles, Alistair, Brian Matthews, Michael Wilson and Dan Brickley.”SKOS Core: Simple Knowledge Ogranisation for the Web.” International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications: Vocabularies in Practice. Available: http://purl.org/dcpapers/2005/Paper01

Cited by Harper, Corey A. and Barbara B. Tillett. See above for full reference.

Harris, Roy. The Language-Makers. London: Duckworth, 1980.

Read chap. 4-5.

Wednesday, 30 May

Harris, Roy. The Language-Makers. London: Duckworth, 1980.

Read chap. 6-8. Finished.

Some things read this week, 13 – 19 May 2007

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Saturday, 12 May [due to early posting last week]

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

  • Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” [a snippet]
  • Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death
  • Emily Dickinson, “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”

Tuesday, 15 May

Ward, Jewel. “Unqualified Dublin Core Usage in OAI-PMH Providers.” OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 20 (1), 2004: 40-47.

Hutt, Arwen and Jenn Riley. “Semantics and Syntax of Dublin Core Usage in Open Archives Initiative Data Providers of Cultural Heritage Materials.” JCDL ’05 June 7-11, 200, Denver, Colorado: 262-270.

Both of these were read for Metadata Round Table tomorrow.

Wednesday, 16 May

Shreeves, Sarah L., Ellen M. Knutson, Besiki Stvilia, Carole L. Palmer, Michael B. Twidale, amd Timothy W. Cole. “Is “Quality” Metadata “Shareable” Metadata? The Implications of Local Metadata Practices for Federated Collections.” ACRL 12th National Conference April 7-10, 2005, Minneapolis, Minn.: 223-237.

Also read for Metadata Round Table today. I even attended this presentation at ACRL.

Priss, Uta. “Multilevel Approaches to Concepts and Formal Ontologies.” In Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, ed. Advances in Classification Research, Vol. 12: Proceedings of the 12th ASIST SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, held at the 64th Annual ASIST Meeting, November 2-8, 2001, Washington, DC. Medford, NJ: Information Today, c2004: 93-111.

Argues for viewing the “classical” or symbolic approaches to representation and that of fuzzy or category-based approaches as complementary forms of representation that can and should be combined.

ontologies, symbolic representation, formal logic, category-based representation, categories, fuzzy logic, neural networks, formal concepts, associative concepts, knowledge systems, emergent structure, cognition, feedback, ASIST SIG/CR

Tennis, Joseph T. “Layers of Meaning: Disentangling Subject Access Interoperability.” In Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, ed. Advances in Classification Research, Vol. 12: Proceedings of the 12th ASIST SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, held at the 64th Annual ASIST Meeting, November 2-8, 2001, Washington, DC. Medford, NJ: Information Today, c2004: 113-129.

Proposes a multilayer conceptual framework for a system for subject access interoperability, where levels of meaning, relationships, extension and intension are individually controlled. Claims this will solve the problems Lancaster identified as inherent in switching between vocabularies: 1) overlap of subject matter, 2) specificity, 3) degree of pre-coordination, and 4) hierarchical, synonymous and other relationship structure.

subject access, interoperability, subject access interoperability, vocabularies, mapping, switching, compatibility, ICC, BSO, intension, extension, meaning, relationships, supra-thesaurus, reconciliation, conceptual warrant, literary warrant, Universal Source Thesaurus, conceptual framework, concepts, subjects, classes

Thursday, 17 May

Greenberg, Jane and Eva Méndez. “Introduction: Toward a More Library-Like Web via Semantic Knitting.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 1-8 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 1-8. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_01

This is the introduction to the issue of CCQ that was mentioned several times at the LC Working Group meeting. Basically sets up the issue and then gives a brief overview of the articles. The issue is divided into 2 parts: Semantic Web foundations, standards and tools; and Semantic Web projects and perspectives.

Semantic Web, web, libraries, introduction

Harper, Corey A. and Barbara B. Tillett. “Library of Congress Controlled Vocabularies and Their Application to the Semantic Web.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 47-68 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 47-68. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_04

This article was also mentioned several times during the LC Working Group meeting. Discusses how historically-library controlled vocabularies and classification schemes “can serve as some of the building blocks of the Semantic Web” (47). Talks about how they might fit within the structure of the Semantic Web, possible uses, how they can be encoded, and some early collaborations. Also discusses authority control and how this can fit within the Semantic Web.

Is at a fairly big picture view and falls short of any discussion of the economics and rights management. Based on all the discussion at the LC Working Group meeting I thought this was supposedly some “radical” call to “Free the Authorities!” Alas, it is no such thing. Jennifer Bowen was far more radical than this. That isn’t saying much, btw.

Semantic Web, web, LC, controlled vocabularies, compatibility, authority control, standards, XML, OWL, SKOS, MODS, MADS, DCMI, DC Abstract Model, MARC relator terms, DC, MARCXML, RDF, DDC, LCC, LCSH, TGM I, TGM II, GSAFD, TGN, AAT, classification schemes, UDC, MeSH, NLM, Terminology Services (OCLC), identification, disambiguation, collocation, VIAF, AUTHOR, metadata, FOAF, markup, encoding

Weibel, Stuart L. “Social Bibliography: A Personal Perspective on Libraries and the Semantic Web.” Co-published simultaneously in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 43 (3/4), 2007: 227-236 and: Knitting the Semantic Web (ed. Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez) Haworth Information Press, 2007: 47-68. doi:10.1300/J104v43n03_13

Billed as “present[ing] a personal perspective on libraries and the Semantic Web” (227). Major sections are: Computing power, Processable text, Social software and Web 2.0, and the final section, Social bibliography and the declining hegemony of catalog records.

Weibel begins by asking if perhaps we are not seeing the same sorts of claims for the Semantic Web as we did for artificial intelligence two decades ago. He then sets out to show what is different in this situation, and seems to have a fairly balanced perspective. Part of the problem as he says is that the “Semantic Web isn’t primarily about semantics at all” (228). As the W3C states:

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects (228)

A few sentences that resonated with me:

Libraries need to support not the Semantic Web, but the semantic lives of our users, … (231).

MARC cataloging remains one of the most successful structured data exchange standards in use (and one of the most long-lived, as well) 232.

The specification of an ontology implies a thorough understanding of the scope and structure of a knowledge domain. Semantic coherence of this kind is rare outside a tightly constrained domain, and leads one to wonder whether ontologies are likely to play a practical role on the open Web (233).

[This is extremely interesting considering Ontologies make up one of the main layers of the Semantic Web Stack, and that this layer has been implicated in the slow progress of the Semantic Web by Berners-Lee, for one (See Harper & Tillett (above p. 49).]

The last section talks about “social bibliography” and I must admit I am not really familiar with this concept. Hmmm … there’s a book by this title by Ranganathan, although I don’t think this is the same use as some of the web pages I saw using this term. I’m not convinced it is even one concept, but perhaps many. I wish Weibel had said more about what he meant by this concept. The discussion was mostly about online reviews at places like Amazon.com and how reviews should be first class objects and, thus, need to have persistent identities, be harvestable on the open Web, and be “managed intellectual content in their own right” (234). In other words, be curated, be citable (linkable), and claimable by their authors (234).

I’m not really sure what work “social” is doing in this concept, although it is doing some. I’m just ready for the day when “social” is no longer applied as a modifier to almost every concept. But then perhaps we need to grow past “friends” first.

Semantic Web, web, libraries, social bibliography, Web 2.0, computing power, processable text, social software

Tennis, Joseph T. “Diachronic and Synchronic Indexing: Modeling Conceptual Change in Indexing Languages.” [pdf] In online proceedings: Clément Arsenault and Kimiz Dalkir, eds. “Information Sharing in a Fragmented World: Crossing Boundaries” Canadian Association for Information Science. Held at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, May 10 – 12, 2007.

The 1st important point is that there are several years worth of proceedings of the Canadian Association for Information Science available online. The link for this article was sent to me by my advisor for my controlled vocabulary-related work, along with a few others from these proceedings.

Outlines a model of conceptual change in indexing languages; in other words, provides for diachronic indexing. Demonstrates conceptual change in an indexing language by looking at eugenics in DDC. Describes3 ways in which meaning and relationships are established and change in n indexing language: structural, terminological, and textual.

I hope to get a few minutes to talk with Joe Tennis at NASKO. I’m not sure how his work has been progressing the last few years, but most of his papers that I’ve been reading (see above for another) are at this fairly abstract level. They sound like great ideas, but can we code them (currently) and make them work? And, if so, do they actually make a positive difference towards any of our needs? Maybe he can fill me in on such work, or point me to the work itself.

indexing, conceptual model, diachronic indexing, synchronic indexing, annotation, revision, concept record, classification format, transfer encoding, structurl change, terminological change, textual change, intertextuality

Thursday – Friday, 17 – 18 May

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, ch. 15 “Putnam’s Theorem.”

Discusses Putnam’s logical critique of objectivist semantics as internally inconsistent.

Friday, 18 May

Harris, Roy. “Epilogue: Saying Nothing.” In The Language Machine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

This is quite good as David Bade said a few days ago. I read the Epilogue and have now begun at the beginning. I also picked up 3 other Harris books.

Saturday, 19 May

Harris, Roy. The Language Machine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Read Introduction and chapters 1 – 3.