Semantic Web Hacking

This is a general collection of my Semantic Web hackings, often using CWM and the Notation3 (N3) format.

Palmer, Sean B. InfoMesh (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Semantic

The Semantic Web In Breadth

This piece speaks about the different parts of the Semantic Web and how they fit together.

Swartz, Aaron. LogicError (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Semantic

The Semantic Web: 1-2-3

This document is not intended to teach you RDF via my own words, but rather to hand-hold you through the 'good' parts of the same journey I took. If it looks like a big link-list with menial comments from the peanut gallery, then you're not far off the mark of my intent. This is by no means definitive, nor was that the goal.

Disobey.com (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>XML

The Semantic Web: An Introduction

This document is designed as being a simple but comprehensive introductory publication for anybody trying to get into the Semantic Web: from beginners through to long time hackers. Recommended pre-reading: the Semantic Web in Breadth.

Palmer, Sean B. InfoMesh (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Semantic

Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web: Techniques and Challenges for Visualizing FOAF  

The Semantic Web promises to provide new applications for Internet users through the use of RDF metadata attached to various information resources on the web. Yet issomewhat unclear who will provide the metadata, or what will motivate people to provideit, let alone the exact nature of the applications the Semantic Web will ultimately support. What will the ¡°killer app¡± of the Semantic Web be, and what shape will it take?

Paolillo, John C. and Elijah Wright. (We)blog Research on Genre Project, The (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Social Networking

Strategies in Re-Purposing Graphics for Interactive Intelligent Delivery

In the domain of aerospace/defense, a products life cycle may likely span up to 30 years. The amount of technical data required to manufacture, operate, and maintain those products is immense. The graphic representation of that data facilitates the communication of operational and maintenance instructions. This paper outlines issues with creating, authoring, revising, and delivering intelligence with graphics and the associated meta-data.

Woolsey, Jeremiah and Martin Jackson. XML Europe (2001). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

Tag Cloud in Chinese Websites

Tag cloud displays tags in a website which emphasize some of the tags by showing them with larger font sizes, and/or in darker colors. Moreover, tags in a tag cloud are usually arranged in alphabetical order. Tag cloud seems to work in the English world as a means of visualization as well as an extra means of navigation - what about in the Chinese world or more specifically, what about in Hong Kong?

Wong, Rex. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>China

Tag, You're It!

I was shocked today when I realized I hadn't ever written a post on tagging. At the ASTD TechKnowledge conference, when I explained Web 2.0 to a group, tagging was an integral part of the conversation. But tagging requires you to take a step back from the web, and consider how you think.

Lentz, Michelle. Write Technology (2007). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Collaboration

Thesaurus Construction

A tutorial on the basics of constructing an information retrieval thesaurus. It includes a glossary of thesaurus terms.

Craven, Timothy C. University of Western Ontario (1998). Articles>Language>Information Design>Metadata

Topic-Oriented Information Development and Its Role in Globalization

For all of its upside, XML-based single-source publishing has proven to be expensive and complicated to implement. XML-based single sourcing requires significant tool development, data conversion, and system integration prior to realizing the benefits of repurposing and reuse. To mitigate this, some vertical industries have developed their own XML tag sets. While successful on their own, these vertical industry efforts have not been extensible to other industries. A new XML-based approach to information development is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).

Trippe, Bill. Gilbane Report (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>XML

Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration  

In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e. metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC/CRM, an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and the ABC ontology, a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities.

Doerr, Martin, Jane Hunter and Carl Lagoze. Journal of Digital information (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Two Kinds of Keywords

I have long wondered why government web sites all over the world tend to use metadata of several different types jumbled together and overlapping. For example, pages with two description metatags or two or three title tags are common. I suspect that most of the replication and confusion has developed for historical reasons.

McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Una Classificazione per il 21' Secolo. Principi e Struttura della Classificazione Bibliografica Bliss

L'articolo descrive il funzionamento della Classificazione Bibliografica Bliss, 2a edizione (BC2), sistema di classificazione interamente basato su uno schema a faccette, di cui Vanda Broughton è la curatrice insieme a Jack Mills.

Broughton, Vanda. AIB (2001). (Italian) Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Unraveling the Mysteries of Metadata and Taxonomies

Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website, talks about the transition from being a consultant to an 'innie' IA, unravels the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies and shares her vision of the future of IA.

Bailey, Samantha and Christina Wodtke. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Unraveling the Mysteries of Metadata and Taxonomies

Recently Boxes and Arrows caught up with Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website. She talks about the transition from being a consultant to an 'innie' IA, unravels the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies and shares her vision of the future of IA.

Wodtke, Christina. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

La Web Semántica, Hoy

Hace casi tres años comentábamos que la promesa de la web semántica era convertir la red en 'un espacio auto-navegable y auto-comprensible.' ¿Dónde estamos hoy en día?.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Metadata

What Is RDF?

RDF was originally created in 1999 as a standard on top of XML for encoding metadata--literally, data about data. Metadata is, of course, things like who authored a web page, what date a blog entry was published, etc., information that is in some sense secondary to some other content already on the regular web. Since then, and perhaps especially after the updated RDF spec in 2004, the scope of RDF has really evolved into something greater. The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information about web resources, but information about and relations between things in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc.

Tauberer, Joshua. XML.com (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Metadata

An XML Architecture for Technical Documentation: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture  

DITA is an architecture for creating topicoriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains, allowing groups to create very specific, targeted document type definitions using a process called specialization, while at the same time reusing common output transforms and design rules. We discuss several methods that can be used to extend DITA’s basic topic types.

Day, Don, Erik Hennum, John Hunt, Michael Priestley and David Schell. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>XML

What Is A Controlled Vocabulary?

A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user.

Leise, Fred, Karl Fast and Mike Steckel. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary

The Folksonomy Tag Cloud: When is it Useful?    

The weighted list, known popularly as a `tag cloud', has appeared on many popular folksonomy-based web-sites. Flickr, Delicious, Technorati and many others have all featured a tag cloud at some point in their history. However, it is unclear whether the tag cloud is actually useful as an aid to finding information. We conducted an experiment, giving participants the option of using a tag cloud or a traditional search interface to answer various questions. We found that where the information-seeking task required specific information, participants preferred the search interface. Conversely, where the information-seeking task was more general, participants preferred the tag cloud. While the tag cloud is not without value, it is not sufficient as the sole means of navigation for a folksonomy-based dataset.

Sinclair, James and Michael Cardew-Hall. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Cyberabstracts: A Portal on the Subject of Abstracting Designed to Improve Information Literacy Skills    

With the overall purpose of improving the information literacy skills of librarianship and information science students, an academic portal specifically centred on abstracts and abstracting resources is proposed. We take the existing literature, together with our knowledge and experience of abstract/abstracting topics and web-based technologies to conceive the research design. The research mainly consists of the selection, assessment and web-display of the most relevant abstracts on knowledge management, information representation, natural language processing, abstract/abstracting, modelling the scientific document, information retrieval and information evaluation. The resulting Cyberabstracts portal presents its products consistently and includes reference, abstract, keywords, assessment and access to the full document. Improvement opportunities for this unique subject-based gateway, representing much more than a mere subject catalogue, are uncovered as the starting point on a planned route towards excellence.

Pinto, Maria. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Metadata

Design and Development of a Concept-Based Multi-Document Summarization System for Research Abstracts    

This paper describes a new concept-based multi-document summarization system that employs discourse parsing, information extraction and information integration. Dissertation abstracts in the field of sociology were selected as sample documents for this study. The summarization process includes four major steps — (1) parsing dissertation abstracts into five standard sections; (2) extracting research concepts (often operationalized as research variables) and their relationships, the research methods used and the contextual relations from specific sections of the text; (3) integrating similar concepts and relationships across different abstracts; and (4) combining and organizing the different kinds of information using a variable-based framework, and presenting them in an interactive web-based interface. The accuracy of each summarization step was evaluated by comparing the system-generated output against human coding. The user evaluation carried out in the study indicated that the majority of subjects (70%) preferred the concept-based summaries generated using the system to the sentence-based summaries generated using traditional sentence extraction techniques.

Ou, Shiyan, Christopher Soo-Guan and Dion H. Goh. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Information Design>Assessment>Metadata

Affinity Diagram

The affinity diagram, or KJ method (after its author, Kawakita Jiro), wasn't originally intended for quality management. Nonetheless, it has become one of the most widely used of the Japanese management and planning tools. The affinity diagram was developed to discovering meaningful groups of ideas within a raw list. In doing so, it is important to let the groupings emerge naturally, using the right side of the brain, rather than according to preordained categories.

SkyMark (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Charts and Graphs