Noise Between Stations

Organization Schemes

  • We’ll Reach the Semantic Web One Small Step at a Time

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    1 min read

    XFN and FOAF were two small steps in that direction, and Google just built on them with the Social Graph API (watch the friendly little video intro). Any day now we’ll see an application that not only helps us generate XFN and FOAF data, but does so in a way that manages our online identities,…

  • Did you know there’s a vaccine for chickenpox?

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    2 min read

    I had no idea until a friend of mine, an adult, just caught chickenpox (she actually knew about the vaccine but her doctor told her she’d been ‘exposed’ and didn’t need it). Apparently the vaccine was approved in the U.S. in 1995. If you have never had chickenpox and haven’t been vaccinated, you can no…

  • Better generalizations: finding true relationships between categories and traits

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    1 min read

    Malcolm Gladwell’s Troublemakers extends his Blink thinking to how we generalize. The takeaway is “It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable — or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization.” In the article he asks whether pit…

  • 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…

  • Elevators demand poems

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    1 min read

    The The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a compilation from the journal that asserts “reading is the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while…

  • 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,…

  • Bottom Up

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    1 min read

    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…

  • Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools

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    3 min read

    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…

  • 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…

  • Looking into Storytelling

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    3 min read

    I’m designing a site for my sister’s fiance’s business, he does interior design and construction contracting. While my idea for the IA and navigation is simple and workable, it just ain’t compelling. About Us, Services, Portfolio [yawn]… I asked the designer to spruce it up and she was like, um, ok… What do customers get…

  • Article: The Semantic Website

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    2 min read

    Get a pot of coffee or two in me and out pops another article, this time in Digital Web under the unwieldy title of Smarter Content Publishing, Building a semantic website to increase the efficiency and usability of publishing systems. Don’t bother reading it, I’ll sum it up for you: Manually marking up HTML is…

  • Introduction to Ontologies from McGuinness

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    1 min read

    Deborah L. McGuinness, ontology goddess, released Ontologies Come of Age, a chapter to an upcoming book. A relatively gentle introduction, along the way she illustrates the difference between controlled vocabularies and ontologies: the former have implicit is-a relationships and the latter have explicit is-a relationships (e.g. in a taxonomy a Merlot is a narrower term…