Todd has got a nice mix of enterprise metadata from both theory and practice since he did his dissertation at the same as working at Bell South on real enterprise metadata needs. He has presented at several conferences involving both the more techie stuff at DAMA International as well as Dublin Core and other related conferences. I believe this intesection of the techie/practical world and the theory/academic world gives us a good mix of the challenges we face at managing information systems. He's definitely in the mix of things I'd like to be involved. It will be interesting to see where his blog goes in sharing his experiences. Many of his previous presentations and handouts are also available on his site.

“The is a cross-organizational, multi-disciplined effort to establish a standard for all public broadcasting content (radio and television), in order that metadata might be more easily exchanged between colleagues, software systems, institutions, community partners, individual citizens, etc. The Project will be a “touchstone,” a single, streamlined standard to which other database structures, including those of PBS, NPR, major producing stations, and other asset/content management systems will be “mapped.” It can also be used as a guide for the onset of an archival or asset management process at an individual station or institution.”

is a next-generation reasoning system for the Semantic Web. Historically, Metalog has been the first system to introduce reasoning within the Semantic Web infrastructure, by adding the query/logical layer on top of RDF.

Metalog lets you do near-natural language queries on documents, acting as a bridge between the user and the RDF.

Great article in NYTimes(free registrated required) related to information retrieval, categorization/classification, and use.

Marti Hearst is quoted regarding information vizualization, text mining, and such. Most of the focus was on retrieval in homogenous content such as Medline. The reason why I liked the article was it provides an example of how people/business benefit from better IR tools for such disciplines as medicine.

The is currently going on in Seattle this week. A couple of the attendees and I will be sharing our notes(and photos) when we've recovered(it's actually still going on). But until then, enjoy the .

Kendall Grant Clark of what's to come on the Web.

I posted my . It's rather lengthy and may only be of interest to those interested in what's happening with library information systems and services.

Lillian Woon Gassie and Greta E. Marlatt's conference provided a thorough examination of the process undertaken to build a digital library for the Homeland Security program of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. The presentation gave a good idea of the steps leading to the development of the digital library, which will eventually be partially available to the public, but will mainly serve students in the School and other military and civilian people involved in Homeland Security. The presentation touches on goals and rationale for the project, audience and personas, political and monetary constraints, metadata and classification strategies, technical specifications and and analysis of tools and technologies evaluated and selected for the project.

Lillian has posted afew other presentations that may be of interest as well to information architects. As usual, you won't get all the details communicated in a PowerPoint presentation, but when reading the "Digital from Birth" PPT, be sure to look at the very extensive speaking notes that go with each slide.

Digital from Birth: Information Architecture for Building a Digital Library,
presentation with Greta E. Marlatt at the SLA Annual Conference, New York City, June 9, 2003.
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,
presentation at the e-Gov Knowledge Management Conference, Washington, D.C., April 16, 2003.

,
presentation at the Monterey Bay Area Workshop on Data Management & Visualization, MBARI, Monterey, April 7, 2003.

Just came back from a conference on . A recurring topic that surfaced about data management was the relevance of their work in relation to unstructured information. A reality check for everyone was that most corporate information actually existed in semi-structured of unstructured information and not in databases. From this thought, I was directed to DM Review and in particular this article. - By Robert Blumberg and Shaku Atre. I definitely see an opportunity between IA(metadata/ux) type folks cross-pollinating with data modelers and data managers. It will be interesting to see and I look forward to hearing more from here. Thoughts?

I wrote an that may interest some ia/ readers. Here's the abstract from Ebsco:

Discusses a type of weblogging called knowledge
logging or k-logging. Information that can easily be put onto web sites; Organizations that can communicate knowledge easily with K-logs; Software that can be used for k-logging; Librarians who should provide content, share knowledge, and provide access.

The second issue of is out. Especially interesting is :

Responding pictures of secondhand goods or used vehicles, which are offered in the Internet e.g. with Ebay deceive frequently over the true quality of a commodity away. ...In our laboratory study which runs over a period of 3 months we logged the Internet purchase behavior of 859 persons with a customized XMosiac 10.5 browser. We can show in this study that during identical description of a product the preference was given to the article with a photo, in 87 percent of the cases. ... We can significantly show that a worse product with photo can be sold thus better than a better without photo.

This very clearly shows the power that information architects and web designers have to persuade visitors, which is what and (and ) have been saying for a while.

And, yes, as someone commented last time, disinfojournal is a bit strange, but that's what I think I like about it...

On SIGIA, Karl Fast proposed a rough . The layers are content, metadata, semantic, representational, and interaction.

Librarians kick ass on the metadata and semantic layers. They suck on the representational and interaction layers.

, “the first international e-journal of disinformation on the net,” has launched, and the first issue is available online. From their home page

There is obviously a huge lack of quality information on behavior, amount and usage regarding disinformation on the internet. As information has been increasingly invested with value, people have tried to manipulate, destroy, or acquire it in any way possible. Circumstances and instances cover a broad range of disinformation on the net or IP-based networks. The disinfojournal deals with topics in all areas of disinformation. This includes, but is not limited to library and information science, information technology, electronic publishing, database management, data mining, knowledge production, knowledge dissemination and of course malinformation and disinformation approached from sociological, psychological, philosophical, theoretical, technical, and applied perspectives.

The includes and , among others.

Unfortunately, the only way to get the full text is via email (?); HTML and PDF abstracts are available online.

Just saw the call for papers for the (Seattle, WA) that will be held September 29 - October 2, 2003.

John Kupersmith is attempting to devise an .

The purpose of this site is to help library web developers decide how to label key resources and services in such a way that most users can understand them well enough to make productive choices. It serves as a clearinghouse of usability test data evaluating terminology used on library web sites, listing terms that tests show are effective or ineffective labels. It presents alternatives by documenting terms that are actually used by libraries. It also suggests "best practices" for reducing cognitive barriers caused by terminology.

I have been dealing lately with user research based on interviews and product usage data. Some needs related to this work have been bouncing around in my head. What's fascinating to me is that related new literature has recently come across my desk and I've also participated in some conversations recently that have definitely informed how I am considering fulfilling these needs. That any of these seemingly separate things (literature, discourse, my work) should be related is amazing to me.

Here are four related recent articles and discourses that seem to me to have the theme of comparing pre-determined information structure with information usage-based mapping/cognition.

• The latest JASIST, which arrived this morning,
• My conversation with office mate, Hilde, about Google and how social relevance reveals reveals information seeking/using behaviors rather than political/corporate agendas. Related is the article in the Atlantic,
• My conversation with James Spahr about his
• on Information Foraging Theory