Victor – Page 31 – Noise Between Stations

Thinking in Groups

In Group Think, Malcolm Gladwell compares “Saturday Night Live,” the founders of psychoanalysis, and mid-eighteenth century scientists and observes that ‘We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works…in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves.‘ By way of explaination he quotes Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), who

‘called it “philosophical laughing,” which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.’

Another quotable bit:

Uglow’s book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states‹the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity‹you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible.

Thanks to Charles for the heads up.

Notes from ASIS&T Annual 2002

Notes from ASIS&T Annual 2002 Monday, November 18
Just spurious notes from what I saw, in general a very good conference:

Plenary with Lee Strickland Thomas Blanton: Openness and National Security
I went in thinking this talk would be boring, but found it very interesting and by the end I was convinced we all need to spend at least a bit of time thinking about how to handle the openness of information within our organizations. I found Tom Blanton particularly insightful, pulling together observations from various inside Washington venues to paint a picture for outsiders.

U.S. government has increased powers to seize information following 9/11. If they show up, we should know

What to do
Who (lawyer) to call
How to handle the event

Law enforcement can intimidate with badges and guns, but of course they need the appropriate court order to seize anything.

Session on Metadata
Elizabeth Liddy and her colleagues at Syracuse are doing great work with metadata. She covered three projects.

Automatic metadata generation through natural language processing.
- A key factor in improving results was informing the system with domain-specific information
- Used Dublin Core and GEM
- Information Extraction method
It’s sponsored by NSF funding spread across partnering universities.
Standard Connection used a standard compendium that maps together various state school standards. The system then attempts to automatically map a resource to standards.
Metatest is a two-year study questioning our assumptions about the value of metadata. One section of it was interesting in that they combined eye-tracking studies and think-aloud protocols.

Terrance Smith presented on knowledge representation of scientific info. He used three projectors in class to display three perspectives on info: outline, metadata, and data. The layout of the information suffered, exposing the difficulty in taking highly structured concepts and relationships and presenting them naturally. He observed that concepts are harder to index than terms

Marcia Lei Zeng of Kent State: There’s a trend toward enhancing standard metadata formats like Dublin Core with domain-specific fields. This parallels development of custom markup languages and metadata formats. The idea reinforced the importance of semantic markup. Most of the time I’m dealing with chunked content, each chuck having its own metadata. But if forced to work on the document level it could be important to sync your metadata format and markup language.

Eric Miller and James Hendler of the W3C presented an overview of the semantic web, RDF, and OWL. Nothing new, but great to hear it being evangelized at ASIST by two smart, effective presenters. SWAD (semantic web advanced development). Check out their initiatives. He repeated the formal ontological features that differentiate them from controlled vocabularies, like semantic restrictions on property relations, range, domain, cardinatlity, logical sets, inverse relationships (same but from the opposite view, like parent of and child of) etc. Some German organizations who signed up: DFKI, Forschungszentrum Infomatik. The layer cake continues to be an important model, they both used it in their presentations – We need to acknowledge in these activities that creating metadata (any kind) is hard and it needs to be reused enough to provide value or else it’s not worth creating – Miller is using the Razor collaborative spam app

Also see U of Maryland’s Mindswap – The Semantic Web Research Group

Bottom Up

Peter Morville has an interesting new article at New Architect: Bottoms Up. In it he advocates more bottom-up design, reacting against overly reductionist top-down methods. But I think his philosophy is actually a balance of the two, and he’s trying to advocate this balance. Take this excerpt:

I have been flabbergasted in recent months by taxonomy construction projects in Fortune 500 companies. Some completely lack user research, and there is often a fierce resistance to discussing how the taxonomy will be used. Let’s just focus on the taxonomy, they say. We don’t want to get distracted by implementation details.

Interestingly, I’ve been experiencing the opposite scenario. Recently I’ve been meeting people, usually technologists toking at the XML pipe, who only want to do bottom up design. When I ask, ‘Who are the users? What are their intentions? What is the scope of your project?’ I find a lack of solid answers. Balance (of top-down and bottom-up) is my new rallying cry.

ASIS&T 2002 Philadelphia

This weekend I’m heading to Philly for the ASIS&T Annual conference. You too? See you at the hotel bar on Saturday, 7:30.

Travels

metadata is labeling for computers

Character counts to word counts

Assuming a typical company website, when estimating the word count for a given piece of text when you only know the character count divide by six.

Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools

Excerpts from Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools:

With databases virtually all of the semantic content has to be captured in the application logic. Ontologies, however, are often able to provide an objective specification of domain information by representing a consensual agreement on the concepts and relations characterizing the way knowledge in that domain is expressed.

All ontologies have a part that historically has been called the terminological component. This is roughly analogous to what we know as the schema for a relational database or XML document. It defines the terms and structure of the ontology’s area of interest. The second part, the assertional component, populates the ontology further with instances or individuals that manifest that terminological definition. This extension can be separated in implementation from the ontology and maintained as a knowledge base.

CL – Common Logic is the emerging successor to the KIF ontology construction language.

The wide array of information residing on the Web has given ontology use an impetus, and ontology languages increasingly rely on W3C technologies like RDF Schema as a language layer, XML Schema for data typing, and RDF to assert data.

…tools, like Microsoft’s Visio for Enterprise Architects, use an object-oriented specification language to model an information domain (in this case, the Object Role Modeling language). These tools presently lack useful export capabilities, although independent tools to convert between UML and ontology languages like DAML+OIL are under development.

Methodology…in today’s tools…explicit support for a particular knowledge engineering methodology (like KADS) is not common.

Interoperability…Ontologies are for sharing…One consideration in the enterprise realm, for example, is the ability of a domain ontology to accommodate specialized XML languages and controlled vocabularies being adopted as standards in various industries. None of the current ontology editors address this capability. Interoperability, instead, is being addressed simply through an editor’s ability to import and export ontologies in different language serializations.

Usability…The standard approach is the use of multiple tree views with expanding and contracting levels. A graph presentation is less common, although it can be quite useful for actual ontology editing functions that change concepts and relations. The more effective graph views provide local magnification to facilitate browsing ontologies of any appreciable size. The hyperbolic viewer included with the Applied Semantics product, for example, magnifies the center of focus on the graph of concepts (without labeled relations). Other approaches like the Jambalaya plug-in for Protégé-2000 achieve a kind of graphical zooming that nests child concepts inside their parents and allow the user to follow relations by jumping to related concepts. Some practitioners however, such as GALEN users, indicate a preference for non-graphic views for complex ontologies.

Peak/End Rule

From Boom and Gloom:

…the Peak/End rule. When people assess a past experience, they pay attention above all to two things: how it felt at the peak and whether it got better or worse at the end. A mild improvement – even if it’s an improvement from “intolerable” to “pretty bad” – makes the whole experience seem better, and a bad ending makes everything seem worse…

…people are on what’s sometimes called a “hedonic treadmill,” meaning that as they get wealthier they quickly adapt to their new circumstances. At first, you love your Lexus, but before long it may as well be your old Pinto. But if you lose the Lexus you don’t easily get over it. “Loss makes you more unhappy than gain makes you happy,” Krueger says.

Day 2

11:46pm: The Institute launched today and the reaction was unexpectedly great. A fair amount of positive comments, links, and new members. The skeptics, rather than simply bashing, asked smart, pointed questions, the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for the past several months. We have good reasons for starting the venture, we have a vision and ways to make it work. We have a structure to lend stability and incentives to attract resources. As a place-less organization we can be nimble and distributed. As an organization without employees there’s less power-hoarding and ego-stroking. We’re all a little idealist and yet practical enough to make it work.

But to the question ‘What are you going to do?‘ we don’t have any hard answers. And that’s part of the beauty. With only a skeleton of top-down oversight we allow lots of ideas to spring up from the bottom and possibly flower. More sustainable than pure volunteer efforts, less stifling than previous notions of what this kind of group could be. I myself am still learning to step back, yield control, and let the experiments run, while still offering guidance or assistance.

Launch: AIfIA

November 4, 2002 – Information architects from across the world today announced the launch of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA). The leadership of AIfIA includes expert practitioners, teachers, and authors from organizations including Yahoo!, AOL/TimeWarner, IBM, Lucent Technologies, MasterCard International, Wells Fargo, Wachovia Corporation, Razorfish, Adaptive Path, the Transportation Security Administration, the University of North Carolina and the University of Texas.

AIfIA is a non-profit volunteer organization that serves as a resource for organizations and individuals seeking to learn more about information architecture and its benefits, and assists information architects who wish to promote the field. Information architecture, the art and science of structuring and classifying information on web sites and intranets, is a growing field that is becoming increasingly important in the modern information age.

“Information architecture leads to increased revenue, decreased development costs, more effective communication and successful web sites,” said Christina Wodtke, AIfIA President and author of the book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. “AIfIA will be a resource for those wishing to learn more about information architecture, whether they’re exploring its benefits for the first time or they’re experienced professionals sharing tricks of the trade with their peers.”

More information about AIfIA and information architecture is available at www.aifia.org.

OSAF’s Vista

Andy Hertzfeld, of the original Macintosh team, writes about the prototype of Vista: a prototype for OSAF’s Networked Personal Information Manager. As a view into a development process that must integrate many different modules into one flexible interface it’s a must read.

I’m also glad to see he landed somewhere that has a good chance of releasing a useful product.

Pushing Weblogs

Sometimes pushing, via email, still wins over pulling via websites. There’s a handful of sites I want to monitor but lack the time or attention to surf, even as an RSS feed. Lately I’ve been using iMorph’s Infominder service. They basically check a site for changes and send you an update. Nice touches are thrown in, like a digest mode and the ability to check RSS feeds. The first ten feeds are free.

The obligatory fake FAQ

I had a good laugh when I was looking at Jesse’s book site and came upon a section titled The obligatory fake FAQ. This touches on one of those seemingly innocent requests that drive me up the wall: people who want to ‘create’ frequently asked questions. The original format was a beautiful thing, a bottom-up list grown organically from questions that need answers. But now that the format is popular, people sit down and make up what they think people will ask. Ugh!

Controlled Vocabularies in the Trenches

Has anyone written about what it’s like to create controlled vocabularies (CVs) in the context of actual project work? I can’t think of any. Below are some spurious notes of my recent experience, probably not understandable to anyone else ’cause I don’t have time to instruct. We’re racing to deadlines and I’m driving as fast as I can…

The exercise and deliverables can be rather abstract for some folks, especially if they view the world through a technology lens. It helps to create illustrations and screen shots to show what is meant and how terms are used.

CVs become a very helpful as a way of recording the tacit knowledge of an organization, helping everyone communicate and use their information. The process of creating the terms helped clarify their use for the team in understanding the business. (It’s tempting at this point to ramble on about language being symbols for meaning, so we’re actually controlling meaning, and those who control meaning have the power to define reality (the power to name – Jansen)).

If the CV is just informing other artifacts and not something that will be maintained or otherwise carried forward, state that so there is no confusion (e.g. do users of a CMS have to look at a thesaurus to discern meaning, or some other more user-friendly artifact?).

Illustrating the CV within the process: Business’s understanding of reality -> CV -> CMS Manual and CMS user interface -> data and metadata -> UI (e.g. web pages). The CV helps build a bridge between the organization and the user interface.

In all the talk of technology, IA, etc., ultimately people are coming for content. If the content sucks, the site sucks. (Content is king). Given that content creation and migration is also expensive, to properly honor the content developer’s work we need to put considerable thought into how content is created. A CV helps ensure the builders understand the subject domain and can communicate it to future content authors.

There’s never a perfectly controlled vocabulary; the number of terms is finite and language can only be clarified to a certain extent. It may be necessary to state this fact to set expectations. It involves judgment calls regarding which terms to control, how to control them (e.g. supplying the definition vs. restricting use via the user interface), and how to define them.

As with any design exercise, you need a scope, users and user intentions to guide the work. When defining the scope of the CV, determining the number of terms may seem arbitrary, but may be necessary given the other factors like time, money, and user response to the system.

CVs for CMS may be used in various ways: to populate menus in the UI (“hard” control), to offer examples, to define terms for a manual (“soft” control), to determine metadata relationships, etc. Specify what you’re using it for explicitly to show its value.

Not creating a CV before building a system can lead to expensive design and technology changes later if the designer’s conception of reality don’t match the users.