Marcia Bates’ After the Dot Bomb reveals a few methods those of us without information science educations should know about. It’s a bit finger-wavey (you web design whipper snappers you!) but it’s worth reading. Also, she’s way off the mark regarding ontologies, but that’s a rant for another day.
Eric unearths a related link, The fundamentals of information science, wherein a university librarian bullet points some big ideas from that field.
Steve Pepper, author of The Tao of Topic Maps (and whose title, incidentally is Information Architect) – makes a concise, interesting comparison of Topic Maps and RDF, arguing for the former. Here’s a few points that struck me:
One key difference – I don’t know if it is the key difference – is that topic maps take a topic-centric view whereas RDF takes a resource-centric view. That, to me, speaks of the LIS point of view vs. the W3C point of view on these matters, focusing on something that can be indexed vs. something that can have a URI.
Because RDF is fundamentally a “framework for metadata”, i.e. for attaching property-value pairs to information resources, it can do the same job as facets. RDF could be used instead of facets, and would arguably provide more power (because of the recursive model and the fact that more metadata semantics, such as datatypes, are pre-defined). But to use RDF instead of facets would mean to lose the connection between the semantic network layer and the metadata, which today is provided for by the fact that facet types and facet value types are topics.
chema, RDF has something topic maps don’t (yet), that is, a standardized way of expressing an ontology and the constraints upon it…Holger will be going one step further (I believe) with a concrete proposal for a topic map schema language….
Ontopia, of which Pepper is the CEO, has published the The Ontopia Schema Language.
The good folks at the Montague Institute posted a collection of A-Z Indexes on the web. These can be incredibly useful in the right circumstances. What I’d like to connect to these are both a method for choosing the terms and usability guidelines for when they make sense.
Once we build all these taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc. we’ll run into situations where we’ll have applications that need to access more than one of these simultaneously. Throw in organizational issues like different departments ‘owning’ their favorite organization scheme and it all gets rather messy. We’ll either need to combine them or ‘crosswalk’ them, that is, mapping them so we know how they interrelate. I started a crosswalk page on the IAWiki to start tracking the issue.
I’ve seen a few projects now, mostly big ones, where we’re trying to create generic metadata behind a website, the idea being you can then use that information for other applications (an example of an application being a portal that uses a person’s customized preferences to filter a set of documents using metadata associated with the documents). But there always comes a point when we have to put a stake in the sand and accommodate the application at hand. Eventually the metadata ends up being customized to work for specific applications and not just any old application. So my current thinking is that we should ignore all but the applications at hand. Metadata can be massaged and schemes can be morphed later to accommodate other applications, or at least that’s the assumption I’m going on for now (please tell me if you know better).
So, rather than start with a metadata scheme, it makes more sense to work backwards starting from the user interface…
The DAML (The DARPA Agent Markup Language Homepage ) site has a nice variation on the usual site map – the new user roadmap. They list some of the primary users:
and each is a link to a set of pages for that user type to explore in order to learn about DAML:
Logician
And since these are metadata folks, I wouldn’t be surprised if these categories are populated dynamically using metadata.