ia play

Drop-down menus aren’t inherently evil but they do seem to encourage all sorts of terrible behaviour.

HMCS CourtFinder includes a menu that is certainly the worst I’ve had to interact with this year, and probably for a quite a long time before that.

The list is incredibly long. But more damagingly it isn’t in *any* order that I can see. Nor is this a list where you or I is likely to be sure exactly what the term we’re looking for is. After all types of court work isn’t a classification that most of us know off-by-heart.

I was digging around in my files this weekend and found this table I made once of different approaches to applying metadata to content. At first glance the volunteers example looks like it is only relevant to charities but alot of scenarios that refer to users tagging, it is actually volunteers tagging. The difference is doing something for your own benefit (users) or contributing something to a greater cause (volunteers).

Really good stuff in this month’s FUMSI article by Ian Davis:

“Image indexing gets especially tricky, and really parts company from the world of document indexing, with the ‘aboutness’ access to images. By their nature images convey a myriad of messages to any number of people. Few images are not ‘about’ some type of abstract concept and few images users make no use of this important access point to image content”

via FUMSI – Image Findability: Improving through Tags.

I really like the fact that Ian both addresses the genuine challenges in describing ‘aboutness’ but also highlights that this is exactly what the users of image retrieval systems want.

A lot of commentators, mentioning no names,  often present cataloguing and classification as librarians imposing their view of the world on the rest of us, conveniently glossing over both the usual librarian motivation of just wanting to help and the existence of a mass users who want help and not an ontological debate.

Related articles:

• Automatic classification resources
• Metadata fundamentals article

I’ve been looking at lots of alternative format bookstores, as part of the e-commerce project. One of these was the Large Print Bookshop which has a category of ‘uncategorized’.

I’m trying to imagine the scenario when the user would think “I know…it’ll be in uncategorized”? Particularly given that the choices above are ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’, surely one of the better examples of exhaustive options?

If Guy is still reading, I’d love to know the thinking…

I remember when I was first working with the UNESCO thesaurus I was amused to see that ‘home-makers’ was a sub-category of women. I just thought that reflected the age of the thesaurus (it has some particularly lovely terminology around disability too).

Now I don’t expect the Daily Mail to demonstrate cutting edge social attitudes, or to be honest , to have particularly great information architecture. So I really shouldn’t have spent quite so long trying to figure out where their recipes section was buried. There is a shortcut on the homepage but I’d come in via a search engine and foolishly thought I could work out the main nav to get me to my destination.

The penny dropped eventually. It is nestled in the ‘Femail’ section,  of course!

Food | Mail Online.

On Nov 3rd I’ll be taking in part in a panel (with Silver Oliver and Helen Lippell) as part of ISKO UK’s Semantic Analysis Technology: in search of categories, concepts & content. The seminar “aims to examine the real issues and technical challenges presented by automating semantic analysis for whatever purpose”.

Presentations by Expert Systems, Rattle Research and SmartLogic will be followed by the three of us sharing our auto-categorisation (or should that now be semantic analysis) war stories.

Following on from the controlled vocabulary resources, I dug out what I have on automatic classification.

Strangely most of the information available on automatic indexing/classification/tagging is pretty dated (although it has been a couple of years since I was immersed in this stuff daily). The most detailed stuff seems to precede the arrival of folksonomies and user tagging, perhaps the buzz around tagging sucked up all the available energy in the metadata space?

DM Review’s 2003 article on Automatic Classification is a good intro to the various types of auto-classification: rules-based, supervised learning and unsupervised learning.

CMS Review has a good list of Metadata Tagging Tools and a list of other resources at the end.

Taxonomy Strategies provide a bibliography on info-retrieval that includes automatic classification articles.

From 2004 there’s the AMeGA project and Delphi’s white paper ‘Information Intelligence: Intelligent Classification and the Enterprise Taxonomy Practice’. Download from Delphi’s whitepaper request form.

There must be more recent stuff that this. I’ll start gathering stuff on the automating metadata page.

myExperiment reminded me of Connotea, as an example of the way the scientific community adopts Web 2.0 ideas with enthusiasm but makes use of the greater structure in the scientific information space.

Connotea is essentially Delicious for scientists. The main functional difference is that when you bookmark a page from a number of sites (Nature, PubMed, Amazon) Connotea will automatically fetch additional bibliographic information. But really difference is the skew of the communities interests.

At an IASummit a few years back, one of the panels opened with the thought “would you still use Delicious if your gran did”, presumably trying to tap into the fear that your gran might start polluting the links for ‘apple’ with pie and strudel recipes.

Football fans, classic historians and internet geeks might irritate each other with their ‘ajax’ links. In fact, classic historians would probably get on everyone’s nerves.

Connetea’s top tags include biotech, gm crops, evolution and insect resistence.

And ‘celebrity’. Perhaps the world of scientists is not so different after all?

Daniel Gilbert’s homepage is the fabulously named hedonic psychology laboratory within which there is a page called ‘playing’. The page has the tag line ‘frivolous linkageZ’ (he’s got a thing about Z).

Slightly outside most people’s expectations for the page is the section called deathZ -which includes the links to Find a Grave and Dying Words .

Control a Man in a Chicken Suit, Kwazy Rabbit and Walls with Things Written On Them are probably closer to mainstream definitions of playful.

Only an IA would have a favourite Wikipedia category. Mine is currently Fictional computers, as stumbled across when constructing a clumsy Skynet-related metaphor.

(From here I found out about Heinlein’s Mycroft Holmes computer which would have shared a namesake with my husband if my father-in-law had got his own way.)

This category particularly appealed to me as the person responsible many years back for the rather ludicrous plant CV at the BBC. I repeatedly had to explain that it wasn’t a list of plant species but, well, plant personalities such as Major Oak, General Sherman tree, Pando and Methuselah. Famous plants… I don’t know what I was thinking (although I am relieved to see Wikipedia has a page for each of the above).

I’ve also always had a soft spot for the Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Fictional locations also caused a more potentially controversial dilemma for the CV management team. Should heaven be a ‘location’ or a ‘fictional place’?

Of course, the sensible decision is the coward’s classification of ‘religious concepts’.