Noise Between Stations

Controlled Vocabulary

  • Falseonomies

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    1 min read

    The Clay Shirky spin on the ethnoclassification discussion is amusing. How such a large percentage of the community manages to discuss a classification technique without explicitly illustrating how it aids in retrieval misses the whole point of classification. But I’ve already covered that ground, so let’s move along to the more interesting, subtle developments. At…

  • Ethnoclassification and retrieval

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    2 min read

    I’ve been doing some product development consulting for a content-centric company, and started to wonder if ethnoclassification could benefit them somehow. I was hard-pressed to think of how, after the content was tagged, the tags would lead to better sets of content. Although they have a lot of content, they only have a few authors…

  • Massaging social classification

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    1 min read

    There’s been some great conversation on social classification among myself, Jess, Stewart, Gene and Alex. I just realized that James already built a system that combines the best of social and constructed categories, for example by creating equivalent associations on the backend to correct for too many, similar categories. His design has the virtue of…

  • Faceted Metadata and Choosing the Right User Interface

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    2 min read

    Tanya’s revealing of her technique for setting facets for her blog was the catalyst that reminded me of a comment Peterme made regarding facets: ‘The system can never know which particular strategy a given user wants to employ — so why not avail them of them all?‘ I don’t think he really means all facets…

  • Radio Alphabet

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    1 min read

    A Alpha B Bravo C Charlie D Delta E Echo F Foxtrot G Golf H Hotel I India J Juliet K Kilo L Lima M Mike N November O Oscar P Papa Q Quebec R Romeo S Sierra T Tango U Uniform V Victor W Whiskey X X-ray Y Yankee Z Zulu Another sometimes used,…

  • Controlled Vocabularies in the Trenches

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    3 min read

    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…