DeweyBrowser: beta forever!

The beta 1 version of the OCLC Research DeweyBrowser has now been superseded by beta 2. We are, after all, in the age of Web 2.0, where the mantra is 'beta forever'!

The beta 2 DeweyBrowser has some nice features, sporting improved functionality and a new interface (the latter being reminiscent of the similarly slick OCLC Open WorldCat interface - also in beta). Users can search for a topic or DDC number, or drill down by clicking through the Dewey captions which are represented as Dewey clouds. New features include the ability to filter search results by format, language, and OCLC Audience Level. Users can also search within result sets, view search histories, and peruse larger Dewey clouds. Of course, the best thing about DeweyBrowser remains the fact that it provides access to – and interlinks with - one of the biggest databases in the world; a union catalogue of over 1 billion hybrid resources (i.e. the OCLC Worldcat database).

We know the story. DDC is the most widely used classification system in the world, built on sound principles that make it handy as a general knowledge organisation tool. It has expressive notation, which makes it conducive to deployment on the web for improved information retrieval (for example, see HILT or OCLC Terminology Services), as well as well-defined(ish) classes and maturely developed hierarchies for powerful retrieval within other information environments. It is good to see OCLC so active in harnessing all this structured data for doing some good. Take a look at OCLC's FRBR inspired FictionFinder, for example, or the new-ish Open WorldCat. It's about putting all this structured information the LIS community has accrued to good work – and it's about time too!

Microsoft Listas: a chicken or egg conundrum?

Microsoft Live Labs has recently launched a new 'tech preview' called Listas, a personal information management web tool. Essentially this is a social bookmarking and collaborative tagging application (similar to the likes of del.icio.us, RawSugar, etc.), allowing users to share web content they have encountered with other users. As the name suggests, Listas is about creating lists. Lists? Sounds a bit boring, eh? Perhaps it is in a way; however, Listas allows you to create extremely rich lists, comprising text, images, RSS feeds, multimedia and so forth, making Listas more like a web clippings service - which is probably the smartest aspect of this tool.

Part of the supposed attraction of Listas is the ability of users to collaborate and share their lists with other users. Users can also subscribe to persons that create particularly interesting lists (top lists and tags are available on the homepage). There is also a community section where you can find the most popular items from the public lists and peruse the tag clouds.

Microsoft have created a toolbar to assist users in compiling lists quickly, but alas it is only available for IE. The absence of a FireFox plug-in is a spectacular oversight from Microsoft; kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face. These systems are so reliant on active user communities such that a Catch 22 scenario inevitably ensues: collaborative Web 2.0 tools require an active community to attract more users. The more users; the more powerful the tool becomes.

Although Listas may fulfil the needs of some personal information management junkies (the term 'information management' is used in the loosest possible sense here!) and has some neat web clipping features, I can't imagine this service getting the critical mass it requires to be useful from a community perspective. More to the point, I can't imagine that users would be particularly interested in someone else's shopping list, meeting minutes, or random web clippings. Have Microsoft completely missed the boat here? Or maybe it's me – can I not see the community value in this? Of course, the beauty of Microsoft Live Labs is that it doesn't really matter; let's just try it and see if it works – a nice ethic to have, if you can afford it.

Slippery Mental Glossary particularly those trickey intranet portal things.

I’ve heard a good number of sermon’s in my time and even delivered a few, a classic device is for the reverend one to stand at the front and say ‘I looked up the word ‘Hope’ in the Oxford dictionary and it said…’ etc. As I stand before my congregation of Exec MBA students I wish that describing Information Management was as straight forward as simple subjects such as hope, justice, poverty and omnipotence. But alas the words keep changing their meaning making hard work keeping my own mental information management glossary in place.

Terms causing some trouble to explain on the MBA module this week are ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), intranets and CRM (Customer Relationship Management Systems).

Intranets are perhaps the key illustration of the problem, Francis Muir teaches this part of the module and he and I also allude to them in an undergraduate E-Commerce module. Originally an intranet was a little private slice of the network based on TCP/IP technologies. It did much the same type of thing as groupware technologies such as Lotus Notes that back in the 90’s were due to take over the world. However over time it has all got a lot woollier. The sort of things that intranet’s do have become packaged as a set of services and sold as either bits of software or as Internet services. So instead we have to think about an intranet not as a bit of IT Infrastructure with services delivered over it but as a set of services available from who knows where. All very well, but this process happens over time and apart from the hassle of updating the lecture notes every year during the transition stage it makes the lecturer seem vague. For students tackling this in their assignments I have suggested that the word ‘Portal’ is now a better description of what they need than intranet but that term is slipping around the glossary as well.

A similar problem has occurred in the world of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in lively discussion with my students. It is easy to see chat a CRM is when it is represented by a lump of business application. But really it stretches beyond the application to be a whole block of capability predicated by having a core set of corporate systems that are basically on top of everything and then some kind of CRM system that adds some functionality veneer on top to marshal all communication with the punters. But then I get the question from one of my students from a housing association that if there core system handles customer interactions is it essentially a CRM system among other things. This is where it becomes more about a view of systems as a whole rather than as components.

Even trickier in terms of movement is the question what is an ERP. Historically I understand that ERP’s came from an integration of sales, logistics and other back office systems in large corporations. I tend to describe them as being monolithic based on a single logical database. But of course the term ERP being successful has been lavished around all other the place. I tend to contrast for students the ERP approach to the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) approach to building the corporate backbone of systems, but then you are in a continuum. The implied vagueness confuses students of course. The question then comes that if the CRM system comes from the same supplier as the ERP system then is it really part of the ERP. The answer to this in my mind is to do with whether they are based on the same logical database and hence integrated at the data level or whether they integrate at the services level. But then it becomes a technical issue and beyond the scope of my MBA crowd to know or care about the difference.

These major terms change meaning perhaps over a 5 or 10 year period. However corporate scale businesses probably hold onto their core systems for longer than that. So if my student is discussing what an intranet is in her company then it can have a whole slew of possible meanings most of which can be wrong for the person sitting next to them.

Makes me wonder how my clever library oriented colleagues with their fancy semantic web ideas are coping with the rapid change of meaning of Information Systems words over time.

All the way from America...

Research is a much abused term. If you ask undergraduate students they will confidently describe a Google based “bash in a couple of terms and hit the return key” as research and subsequently suffer from the delusion that that is all research is. What I have been engaged in for the last week I think could be defined as a “fishing trip”. This is a research approach from the “old days” before the whole world was claimed as available online.

When you were opening a new major area of research you would take yourself off to a monster library (The British Library at Boston Spa was ideal – due to the immense journal collection it possessed) and using printed abstracts and indexes would slowly wade back through the last ten or twenty years of “stuff” as appropriate. At the end of the exercise you would have reasonable confidence that you had covered the field in detail. The subsequent reading of the literature gathered would allow you to patch what gaps there were. As my LCSH topic predates the standard abstracting and indexing services, this older approach was required.

So ensconced on the 5th floor of the Library of Congress Adams building I worked my way through sixty years worth of Library journal about thirty volumes of the Bulletin of the American Library Association and about ten years of the Catalogers’ and classifiers’ yearbook. The most recent volumes consulted were 1940. I would regularly branching off to pick up specialist subject heading lists or contemporary textbooks as I moved forward.

The result of this process can be evaluated in at least two ways. A simple measure of the thickness of the stack of photocopying to be brought back evidences (in a real sense) the extent of the information capture. The other measure came as a surprise to me, it just kind of sneaked up on me as the process developed. My confidence in my knowledge of the topic strengthened as the week proceeded. The previous slow and laborious accumulation of material of the last two years had not inspired my confidence (I was painfully aware of gaps in the process – even though I did not really know what the gaps were!). Having dug in and worked my way through the major sources of information my doubts as to how to proceed have cleared and the next stage in the process seems quite straightforward (at the level of ideas!).

The total luxury of having a whole week to dedicate to nothing else except the research has been massively helpful. I have waked, washed, ate, walked, worked and slept the research. This has allowed effective thinking to occur as those thousand and one well intentioned interruptions that plague my working and home life were simply turned off – along with the mobile phone.

Today is Thanksgiving – the massive American family festival, everything is closed – even the food facility in the hotel – just a continental breakfast – I have to eat out tonight – if I can find somewhere. So the day has been spent sorting my document harvest so I know what I need to copy in my Friday morning visit to the Library.

The real task begins when I get back to Liverpool as I attempt to convert this short sprint in Washington into the steady paced marathon that is required to deliver this research as an academic thesis.

Stop the press: Google is grim!

I always enjoy being kept abreast of scientific developments by tuning into Leading Edge on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday evenings. A riveting piece of radio journalism! Last Thursday (15th November 2007) we had reports on a team from the US that has created cloned embryos from an adult primate and an invigorating debate on the deployment of brain enhancement drugs. We also had researchers that have demonstrated how robotic cockroaches can influence the behaviour of real ones. However, Leading Edge often gives us snippets of news that impinge directly on what we do within the Information Strategy Group – and last Thursday was no exception.

Technology guru Bill Thompson explained why he believes Google is corrupting us all. This is a refreshing viewpoint from a technology commentator and not one we are accustomed to hearing (except from librarians, information scientists and some computer scientists!). Such commentators normally fail to observe the limitations of any information retrieval tool and drone on about how 'cool' it is. Not Thompson. "We have all fallen for the illusion" because it is "easy" and "simple", says Thompson. "Google and the other search engines have encouraged us to forget the fundamental difference between search and research".

Google is indeed easy and simple. To make his point Thompson (unwittingly?) revisits well worn LIS arguments emanating from the metadata, cataloguing, and indexing areas. Some of these emerged in the 1970s when the efficacy of automatic indexing began to improve. These arguments cite issues of reconciling the terms used to describe concepts and issues of collocation (e.g. 'Java' the coffee, 'Java' the programming language, 'Java' the primary landmass of Indonesia, etc.) and differentiating between information about Tony Blair and information by Tony Blair. Thompson almost sounds surprised when he vents spleen over Google's inability to make sense of the word ‘Quark’. Welcome to web search engines, Bill!

The most astonishing part of Thompson's report was not his LIS-tinged rant about Google, but his suggestion that librarians had themselves fallen for the Google illusion, along with the academics and school children. Pardon? What could have given him this impression??? Was it an ill-judged, off hand comment?

The body of research and development exploring the use metadata on the web is gigantic and is largely driven by the LIS community. The 'deep web' is almost synonymous with digital library content or database content under the custodianship of information professionals. Those in content management or information architecture will also be singing from the LIS hymn sheet. The Semantic Web is another development that seeks to resolve Thompson's 'Quark conundrum'. Even at front line services, librarians are rolling out information literacy sessions as a means of communicating the importance of using deep web tools, but also making users aware of Google's limitations (e.g. Google only indexes a small portion of the web, problems of information authoritativeness, etc., etc.).

That is not to say that the profession doesn't flirt with Google; of course it does! It flirts with Google because Google provides a vehicle through which to introduce users to valuable information (often from the deep web). And such flirting does not immediately jettison well formed library and information management theories or principals (see an ex-colleague, for example [1], [2], [3] and [4]).

Of course, I could go on for a lot longer, but there doesn’t seem to be any point as you already know the arguments. But you can listen to Bill Thompson’s report on Leading Edge to hear the arguments of yore restyled by a technology guru. You may also feel compelled to contact Leading Edge to vent your spleen!

MTSR 2007

A paper some ex-colleagues and I submitted to the International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research has now been published as part of the conference proceedings. The paper entitled, 'Terminology server for improved resource discovery: analysis of functions and model', is available online for those that might be interested.

The conference took place at the Ionian University in sunny Corfu; however, owing to work pressures (since moving to LJMU) I was unable to present the paper in person and take advantage of warmer climes! Enjoy!

Interviewing Graduates

On the interview trail. As people will know like superman I have 2 persona’s, by day the mild mannered information technology lecturer by night street wise software entrepreneur. In this later persona I have been interviewing for graduate programmers this last week. While the computer programmers I was recruiting for are more technically oriented than our students in the Information Strategy group it is perhaps informative for those of us trying to prepare our charges for the world of work.

I’ll describe what happened later but for those who don’t read so far the conclusions are that those who both showed a baseline of basic competence and a level of enthusiasm for the subject got the job. In whittling down the applicant we took some notice of degree (subject, university and class) but we certainly didn’t assume that just because someone had done a three-year course in software engineering they could write a tiny computer program. Once we had got candidates to show us a bit of their skills, it was enthusiasm for the subject that counted we don’t want people mopping around the office waiting for break time.

From this I conclude we need to help our students to develop skills that industry wants and to communicate our enthusiasm for the subject to them. If as lecturers we don’t have enthusiasm for our subject we need to go and regain that love of information systems.

For our work interviews half of all applicants applying for the job at www.villagesoftware.co.uk came from John Moores School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. Half from other regional institutions. We had trimmed down from about 30 applicants to 12 for an initial phone sort and then invited 6 to interview of which 5 attended.

We focused on skills, knowledge and enthusiasm. The candidates were given a three page test. While observed and in discussion with a senior developer.

They had to produce a small computer program in a language of their choice based on the Fizz Buzz test, a test that says ‘ok write me a tiny piece of program’. Of the five graduate programmers who showed, one walked straight through this test no problem, 3 produced passable attempts after about 30 minutes and one failed to put anything credible together (John Moores Student I’m afraid).

They then went on to tackle an entity relationship diagram, for this I gave them a simplified version of the Lancashire Chemicals Operational Stock Control case study which I am currently haunting the 4^th Year BIS students with in their Design of Enterprise IS course. None of them were great at this, 3 had a weak attempt and 2 had no concept of the technique. Interestingly we have recently come across ‘senior developers’ (those on about 30K) with similarly no real concept of database design.

Finally we presented one page of functional but poor computer program, written by my own fair hand, and asked the candidates what was wrong with it. They did better here, 4 of the 5 able to make at least some clear comment on quality failures but none left the impression that they really new the difference between industrial strength programming and hobby software development.

These ‘go on show me’ tests sorted the men out from the boys a bit (on this occasion all applicants were male). But we also interviewed them on a series of software development questions, which we had simplified from Coders at Work interview questions. One of the key differences this made was differentiating those who have an enthusiasm for the subject. Some candidates clearly came across as seeing their career as a software developer as an agreeable way to keep the wolf from the door while staying out of the rain, but showed no essential enthusiasm for the subject. As a manager I’d rather be containing peoples enthusiasm than flogging a dead horse.

It all makes me think that at the end of our courses we will offer our students a greater chance of happiness in life if we teach them skills that help them in the world of work but also inspire enthusiasm in the subject that will make working life interesting rather than a drag for wage slaves. Sometimes I feel this will involve some ‘tough love’.

Wikipedia closing the doors?

Is the wiki ethos under threat by new rules from Wikipedia? I've been catching up on recent news and apparently the German version of Wikipedia will be implementing new editing rules which could improve the quality of editing for the online encyclopaedia.

As always, anyone will be able to make article edits, but it will take someone who has been around Wikipedia for an extended period of time and who has garnered trust to make the edits live on the public site. Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) announced that, if successful, the German pilot project could be rolled out across all Wikipedia language sites. This appears to be in response to a series of high profile editorial gaffs, as well as the promotion of malicious edits by high profile celebrities.

I'm generally in favour of Wikipedia tightening the editorial process; I've lost count of the editorial inaccuracies and defaced articles that I have encountered. But is this the beginning of the end for Wikipedia as we know it? Is it an acknowledgement that the public wiki can't scale?

The Information Strategy Group blog is launched!

The Information Strategy Group blog has now been launched! It is anticipated that, over time, this blog will cover the latest news and developments relating to student programmes within Liverpool Business School, group activities (research or otherwise), and musings on significant external news events that impact upon our areas of study.

Enjoy!