Information Strategy Group, LJMU

New Term underway banging on about jobs and placements

2011-09-26T14:57:00.003+01:00

A new term is under way at the Liverpool Business School, mostly induction this week. I have taken the chance while going to the cohort meetings with the 2nd and final year Businesss Information Systems students to go on about my key rants.

These are born partly out of the my experience recruiting over the summer. Namely the necessity of getting something that gives evidence of your greatness on your CV.

While reading new graduate CV's in the summer I was horrified to see people who began with a splurge of waffle about what a great team player, self starter they were, backed by no evidence. Then they list the modules and technologies they covered on their courses, which they and everyone else on their course has covered. And then they finish off telling me that they like to socialise with their friends, watch a movie, play computer games and possibly stay up to date with technology.

They must think this separates them from the crowd but it is rare to come across anyone who doesn't like spending time with their friends, or at least admits to it in a CV. And the other three things are basically sitting in front of a monitor of some type, watching movies, playing games and web surfing. Employers mine included are not going to expect this on its own to push the company forward in these tough times.

We all encourage the students to think about these things, but of course we are often frustrated that the students don't take this seriously until it is too late. As it stands the universities societies fair was just a hundred yards away so I desperately tried to push the students in that direction in the hope that their being treasurer of the university plate balancing team might put some evidence behind their inevitable claim to be a team player, by showing that a group of peers in the team were prepared to trust them with something.

Meanwhile Matthew Baxter-Reynolds writes in the Guardian noting how in the software industry recruitment companies were creating a largely inefficient barrier between the 'talent' and the companies. Roughly suggesting that more candidates should send their CV's direct to potential employers.

I had commented to my colleagues in my day job that we don't seem to get unsolicited CV's anymore, once upon a time we kept a file of them as they accumulated. But now they don't appear. This article seemed to confirm that this was not just my experience. Whereas I get dozens of unsolicited emails from recruitment agencies every week and probably about 150 phone calls a year from the same.

My conclusion is that my students should get out there sending out their CV's looking for jobs and placements depending on their position on the course. The other rants to my (Information Systems) students were that they should get a black belt in Microsoft Office particularly Excel but also Access, so that they can do things that others can't do once they get that job or placement.

When I complete these rants, I am always optimistic that the students will have heard the urgent message and set themselves on a path to a solid career, I choose to ignore the evidence of previous years. Still as Tesco say every little helps.

Does a 2:1 in computing mean you can write a simple computer program?

2011-09-19T11:04:00.004+01:00

As a business person and academic I have two positions of interest in graduates and their capability. At JMU we are always thinking about trying to balance what employers want, what students want to do and what we are able to teach. These things are not always in line of course. As an employer in Software Development I am looking for people with a demonstrable aptitude and broader long term promise.

At Village Software we recently advertised for a graduate trainee for £15k. We had about 50 applicants, of these we spoke to about a dozen, invited 6 to interview, of whom 4 attended. Two things to note here I’ll here consider the most shocking which is the question can you acquire a computing related 2:1 from XYZ University without being able to write a simple computer program, perhaps elsewhere I’ll consider the CV’s that don’t get you a phone call.

We set the interviewees the common and much discussed Fizz Buzz test. There was a frenzy sometime about 2007 about the fact that people applying for programming jobs couldn’t program. The thought was that this was some kind of zombie attack of qualified people without basic competence who were flooding the industry, we needed some way to tell the zombie programmers from the real thing. This coalesced about the fizz buzz test. A simple programming exercise along the lines of:-

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

Graduates failures to pass this test is much discussed for example "why cant programmers program", there are whole blog posts on how to write answers to this "Geek School Fizz Buzz". Making it surprising that none of our four candidates had heard of the problem.

We set a slight variant on the theme fearing, unnecessarily, that candidates might have heard of the problem and learnt a solution.

We asked other questions and had a whole stack of other things but this question was decisive. As an employer I look at peoples degree grade and subject and wonder what they tell me. There is a general question of whether a 2:1 from in a software subject is a guarantee that the student can write a simple computer program. I’m afraid the answer is that it isn’t, although 2 of our candidate did very well, so it is perhaps an indication of an at least 50/50 chance that a graduate can write a computer program.

This is bad for universities. The pressure from potential and actual students is to increase our ‘value add’ and enable them to get a 2:1 otherwise they might buy elsewhere and we’ll be out of business. But the business stakeholders want to see that degree awards represent some measure of useful competence in the chosen subject. A university that lets out a computer student with a 2:1 while unable to complete a simple program in any language of their choice is devaluing their credibility. Our evidence is anecdotal and certainly every student on a computer course certainly has the facility to learn to achieve this level of competence, so they only have themselves to blame.

Unless of course they didn’t have the aptitude in the first place in which case the University has failed to select suitable students for its course. Perhaps they should be doing this test on the way in. In fact why would someone unable to write a brief program such as this even start on a three or four year course of study in this field.

Later today I am trying out this test on some final year Liverpool University students (not represented in our interviews) looking to do a final year project with us, we shall see how they do. Hats off to Liverpool Hope by the way their candidate swept through the technical tests and is now sitting tapping away 10 yards away, saving the day for the home team we also had one John Moores candidate who pulled it off but alas there is evidence that you can get a 2:1 from John Moores without being able to do so.

Blog lifecycles

2011-09-16T17:23:00.000+01:00

Understanding the lifecycle and the dynamics of blogs has been a topic of interest within computing and information science for many years. Blogs exhibit peculiar social and temporal features thus making them a rich domain of study and, quite frankly, more interesting than static web pages. Since this blog is almost four years old, now seems like an appropriate time to review the health of the ISG Blog. It is not my intention to expose our blog to the kind of detailed analysis one would expect to find in the pages of JASIST; but let's look at some of the most basic numbers...

Now, in an ideal world, or a sensible one for that matter, one would be able to output a .csv file from Blogger which would contain a wealth of data on the number of blog posts, the hits these posts have attracted (per week and per month), number of comments, the identity of referring sites, etc, etc. Alas, most of this data is unavailable, and any data that is available has to be generated manually making any serious analysis difficult. Despite these obstacles I displayed sufficient stamina to manually generate some basic blog data and to describe it using the Dataset Publishing Language (DSLP) for running through the Google Public Data Explorer. (There still remains some XML pain but I did it anyway...). Data available pertains to the number of blog postings, their total hits (2007-2011), number of comments per blog post and the length of postings. Data Explorer provides a good overview of the data but doesn't perform any statistics or analysis. I have therefore included some further data analysis below. Anyway, some of the headline figures are as follows:

85 blog postings have been published since October 2007.
George Macgregor (i.e. me) was the most prolific blogger, accounting for 87% of all posts. Johnny Read was next in line, producing 9.41% of all posts; Francis Muir, Jack OFarrell and Keith Trickey each contributed 1.18% of the total posts.
2009 was the most productive year for the blog, with 33 posts being published, accounting for 38.82% of the blog's total posts.
The mean number of page views was 29 per blog post (M = 29; SD = 90; IQR = 18).
On average, 0.8 reader comments were made in response to the blog postings (M = 0.8; SD = 1.23; IQR = 1).
The most read post was this one from October 2009, attracting 751 page views.

Let's look at the last headline figure first.

Figure 1: ISG Blog hits (2007-2011) by author, as viewed in Google Public Data Explorer.

Blogger provides summary data on blog posting page views, or "hits" if you prefer. I extracted these manually to get a measure of post impact. An average of 29 page views is disappointing and – as you can see from the Data Explorer – although there are some traffic spikes which account for the high data dispersion (i.e. SD = 90; IQR = 18), some of the individual page view figures are very low. However, we must remember two important caveats: Google Analytics (used to compile the Blogger data) uses a rigid definition of page views in order to flush out transient visitors. Secondly, many – and perhaps the majority of those dedicated to reading the ISG Blog – will read postings using an RSS reader. Unfortunately, even Google Analytics can't capture data on consumption made via RSS. It is therefore safe to assume that these figures grossly underestimate the number of ISG Blog readers. With this in mind, the top ten most read postings were as follows:

Blackboard on the shopping list (751 page views)
The Kindle according to Cellan-Jones (301 page views)
Some general musing on tag clouds, resource discovery and pointless widgets (235 page views)
Crowd-sourcing facetted information retrieval (103 page views)
Web Teaching Day – 6 Sep 2010 (74 page views)
How much software is there in Liverpool and is it enough to keep me interested? (67 page views)
Trough of disillusionment for microblogging and social software (56 page views)
Jimmy Reid and the public library: an education like no other (52 page views)
Goulash all round: Linked Data at the NSZL (50 page views)
Shout "Yahoo!": more use of metadata and the Semantic Web (46 page views)

Rather surprisingly – but disappointingly given the extra time they take to compose - the top ten most read blog postings tend not to be the longer, more intellectually considered contributions; but the more ephemeral ones. This is clear from the #1 most read posting, which was merely a brief comment on a blogosphere rumour that Google might acquire Blackboard. This post evidently fed into the social and temporal characteristics that can typify blogs and must be considered – using the more up-to-date jargon of the Twitterati – a "trending" topic. It attracted the highest number of page views (751) and comments (9), and to date remains popular (according to some extra data that I have...). In fact, using Gruhl et al.'s macroscopic blog characteristics typology, this posting could be considered "Mostly Chatter". "Mostly Chatter" postings are those that attract attention or discussion at moderate levels throughout the entire period of analysis. The majority of other postings fall within Gruhl et al.'s "Just Spike" category, i.e. they are postings that become active but then suddenly become inactive and demonstrate a very low level of chatter. This appears to be corroborated by the generally low page view figures for most posts and the average comment figures (M = 0.8; SD = 1.23; IQR = 1).

Figure 2: Comments per ISG Blog post (2007-2011).

It is also interesting to note that although Francis Muir only made one blog post during the lifetime of the blog his post features in the top five most read contributions (74 page views). Again, this is perhaps because it was a bursty topic and was trending at the time of publication. It is nevertheless reassuring that at least some of the more intellectually considered contributions feature in the top ten (e.g. 3, 6 and 8). On average though, the rest of us attracted fewer eyeballs. For example, George Macgregor (M = 31; SD = 96; IQR = 18); Johnny Read (M = 14; SD = 31; IQR = 25).

Figure 3 provides an overview of blog post length. As a frequent author of the longest blog posts I have always been worried that I might be boring readers to death (5 posts > 1,000 words). I always felt longer posts were necessary to cover our intellectually stimulating topics. Yet, as it transpires, my average post was shorter than expected (M = 534; SD = 306; IQR = 355), and was actually shorter than Johnny Read's average (M = 668; SD = 154; IQR = 106). I know, I know... My SD and IQR are far higher, but let's not focus on that because, on the face of it, Johnny would appear to be more boring than I am! ;-)

Figure 3: Post length on the ISG Blog by author (2007-2011).

Which leads to the topic that started all this: ISG Blog health, or the blog lifecycle if you prefer. What is the current state of health of the ISG Blog? We noted that 2009 was the most productive year for the blog. This can be easily observed from the graphs, most of which reveal a busy profile during 2009. But according to the graph on total posts (Figure 4), the data reveals a spike in 2009, with a comparable number of contributions in 2010 and 2008, and a similar pattern in 2011 and 2007. In other words, the trend in 2011 seems to be for decline and perhaps even death.

Figure 4: Total post per year by author (2007-2011).

Researchers have been keen to model blog failure for many years. For example, Qazvinian et al.'s research (presented at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media) identifies blogs that are prone to "connection failure" and "commitment failure". As the names of these phenomena suggest, connection failure is a blog that fails to enjoy the network effect within the blogosphere, either because other blogs are not commenting or linking to that blog, or because the readers are not engaged enough to comment on postings. Commitment failures are more difficult to interpret from Qasvinian’s data; however, their data clearly indicates that new bloggers (of circa one month) typically account for 80% of all blog failures (i.e. quits) within any given time window. The most dangerous time in which the ISG Blog could succumb to commitment failure has therefore been and gone. But despite making it past the one month mark by almost four years, the ISG Blog has clearly past its prime. I made half as many posts in 2010 as I did in 2009, and I have thus far made fewer than half my 2010 contributions in 2011. A similar trend can be observed in the number of Johnny Read's posts too. The only tenuous consolation is that as time has gone by my average blog length appears to have increased. However, although this appears to be borne out the scatterplot (Figure 5 - yup, Data Explorer can't do scatterplots or trendlines) in which a upwards linear regression trendline can be observed, it isn't borne out by the associated numbers (R² = 0.0442).

Figure 5: ISG Blog post length for George Macgregor (2007-2011), with linear regression line.

It is no surprise that my diagnosis is that the ISG Blog suffers a mixture of connection and commitment failure, and that my departure at the end of September could be the final nail in the ISG Blog coffin. The question is can someone administer CPR after I depart to save it from near certain death?

The fallacy of the self-organising network: the limits of cybernetic systems theory, or not...

2011-08-03T10:01:00.002+01:00

Recently, the BBC broadcast a series of films by Adam Curtis, the eminent British documentarian. These films were broadcast under the title, All watched over by machines of loving grace, and, in general, all focused on how models of computation and systems have been applied to the world around us. Curtis is well known for his sharp journalism, particularly in areas pertaining to the politics of power. All watched over... differed from his previous documentaries owing to its focus on technology, computers and systems, but the theme of power was nevertheless omnipresent, as was the sharp journalism. I thought some of Curtis' ideas were worth further comment here.

In part two of All watched over..., entitled "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts", Curtis focused on cybernetics and systems theory. Since ex-members of our team were experts in cybernetics I was particularly interested in what he had to say. Curtis examined how cybernetics and systems theory came to be applied to natural ecosystems, and how this gave rise to a distorted view of how nature worked in reality. The very fact that ecosystems are termed "eco-systems" suggests the extent of systems thinking in nature. Indeed, Sir Arthur Tansley, the celebrated ecology pioneer, coined the term in the 1930s. Tansley was fascinated by Freud's theories of the human brain and, in particular, his theory that the brain was essentially an interconnected electrical machine carrying bursts of energy around the brain through networks, much like electrical circuits. As an ecologist, Tansley became convinced that such a model also applied to the whole of nature believing that the natural world was governed by a network of machine-like systems which were inherently stable and self-correcting. These theories of ecosystems and cybernetics were to fuse together in the late 1960s.

Jay Forrester.

One of the earliest pioneers of cybernetic systems was Jay Forrester. Prof. Forrester (or Emeritus Professor of MIT as he is now) was a key figure in the development of US defence systems in the late 1940s and early 1950s and with his colleagues he developed theories of feedback control systems and the role of feedback loops in regulating – and keeping in equilibrium – systems. The ecology movement assimilated this idea and increasingly viewed the natural world as complex natural systems as it helped to explain how stability was reached in the natural world (i.e. via natural feedback loops). Forrester's experience of developing digital combat information systems and the role of cybernetic systems in resolving such problems inspired him to explore systems difficulties in alternative domains, such as organisations. This would become known as Systems Dynamics. As the Systems Dynamics Society note:

"Forrester's experiences as a manager led him to conclude that the biggest impediment to progress comes, not from the engineering side of industrial problems, but from the management side. This is because, he reasoned, social systems are much harder to understand and control than are physical systems. In 1956, Forrester accepted a professorship in the newly-formed MIT School of Management. His initial goal was to determine how his background in science and engineering could be brought to bear, in some useful way, on the core issues that determine the success or failure of corporations."

Forrester used computer simulations and cybernetic models to analyse social systems and predict the implications of different models. As Curtis notes in his film, Forrester and others cybernetic theorists increasingly viewed humans as nodes in networks; as machines which demonstrated predictable behaviour.

Curtis is rather unkind (and incorrect, IMHO) in his treatment of Forrester during the 70s environmental crisis. Forrester's "world model" - created under the auspices of the Club of Rome and published in the seminal "Limits to Growth" - is portrayed in a negative light in Curtis' film, as is the resulting computer model. Yet, systems theory is supposed to provide insight not clairvoyance. This isn't reflected in Curtis' film. Forrester's model appears now to have been reasonably accurate and was later amended to take account of some of the criticisms Curtis highlights. And few could argue with the premise that destiny of the world is for zero growth; to maintain a "steady state stable equilibrium" within the capacity of the Earth.

Anyway, summarising the intricacies of Curtis' entire polemic in this brief blog posting is difficult; suffice to say the aforementioned intellectual trajectory (i.e. cybernetics, ecosystems, etc.) fostered a widespread belief that because humans were part of a global system they should demonstrate self-organising and self-correcting properties, as demonstrated by feedback control systems and most potently exemplified in the natural world by ecosystems. In particular, these ideas were adopted by the computer utopians (The California Ideology) who dreamt of a global computer network in which all participants were equal and liberated from the old power hierarchies; a self-organising network, regulated by data and information feedback loops. Of course, the emergence of the Web was considered the epitome of this model (remember the utopian predictions of the Web in the mid-90s?) and continues to inspire utopian visions of a self-organising digital society.

The inherent contradiction of the self-organising system is that despite rejecting hierarchical power structures such systems in the end actually foster concentrations of power and hierarchy. Curtis cites the failure of the hippie communes, such as Synergia which implemented failed "ecotechnics", and the relative failure of revolutions in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Iran, all of which were coordinated via the Web. And, I suppose, we could extend this to examples in the so-called Arab Spring where the desire for change during the revolution, often orchestrated via Facebook and Twitter, has not always been replicated afterwards.

On this count I feel Curtis is probably correct, and aspects of his conclusion extend further. Indeed, the utopian vision of egalitarian self-organising computer networks continues and has been rejuvenated most recently by social media and "new tech", or Web 2.0 as it is now unfashionably called. Even examples which epitomise the so-called self-organising principle, such as Wikipedia, have morphed into hierarchical systems of power. This is partly because not everyone who contributes to Wikipedia can be as trusted as the next; but it is more because groups of users with a particular world view coalesce to assert their views aggressively and religiously. Editing wars are commonplace and new article rating systems have been introduced, both of which are prone to John Stuart Mill's theories on the tyranny of the majority - all within a Wikipedia ecosystem. Contributions are increasingly governed by a hierarchy of Wikipedia Reviewers who wield their powers to scrutinise, edit, and delete flagged articles. (Ever tried creating a new article on Wikipedia? It's not as easy as you think. Within seconds you will contacted by a reviewer. They relish their control over the type of knowledge Wikipedia publishes, and they make sure you know it…)

'Network of berries' - Quinn Dombrowski, Flickr - some rights reserved

But the same erosion of self-organisation can be applied to the disproportionate growth of particular topics within social bookmarking systems (which are supposed to provide a self-organising and egalitarian way of organising information), or those who have come to dominate the blogosphere or Twittersphere. Even a social networking behemoth like Facebook is, in itself, a quintessential mechanism of control and power. Hundreds of millions of users subjected to Facebook's power and the control over personal data that it implies. So while some users may feel liberated within the Facebook ecosystem, aspects of their identity and, perhaps, their economic and political freedom have been relinquished. I'm not sure this is an issue Clay Shirky addressed satisfactorily in his recent monograph, so perhaps he and Curtis should arrange a chat.

Yet, it is incredible how pervasive the ecosystem metaphor has become. Discussing the new tech bubble on BBC News recently, Julia Meyer rationalised it as "ecosystem economics". Says Meyer:

"...very distinct "ecosystems" have emerged during the past half-decade […] Each of these camps are deeply social - there is a network at its core.

"Companies like LinkedIn and Groupon have significant and growing revenues. While these may not entirely support their valuations, they clearly point to the fact that business models plus their understanding of the network-orientation of all business is on the right track. For those of us who finance entrepreneurship in Europe, what this means is we're mostly going to help build "digital Davids" - companies who understand how to re-organise the economics to create robust and sustainable businesses where everybody wins - customers, retailers and ultimately of course, investors.

"So why are firms like Groupon worth billions? How can something as simple as organising a group discount be so powerful? Because ecosystem economics is at play."

Huh. Ecosystems? Networks? Sustainability where "everyone wins"? Re-organising networks? I smell something dodgy – and I'm not referring to the men's lavatory in the John Foster Building.

Sifting CV's out in industry

2011-08-01T11:23:00.006+01:00

I’ve written a couple about recruitment campaigns we've had at villagesoftware.co.uk to get in graduate programmers and we are in the middle of another one. Again bringing people in at the bottom of Software development for £15,000. This superstar starting salary attracted 55 cv’s sign of the times. Last time we did this 2 years ago the split was

50% were expats looking for first UK job.
30% bog standard graduates with relevant degree.
10% were experienced but out of work local developers.
10% Random people with no relevant capability

This time we had many less expats applying, perhaps a weaker pound or perhaps the job centre had advertised thing less widely. Aside from this group , the proportions stayed much the same.

10% were expats looking for first UK job.
50% bog standard graduates with relevant degree.
20% were experienced but out of work local developers.
20% Random people with no relevant capability

My colleagues and I having been through the CV’s and covering letters some things are apparent.

Firstly the obvious things are true. A properly written CV and personable covering letter opens up well. We had one guy who didn’t even give a surname, several who didn’t give a real address.

Very narrow interests do not excite, programming (fair enough), computer game playing, keeping up on technology developments (web surfing), not a collection that point to a rounded candidate. An amazing number led with the fact that they liked socialising with their friends as their main interest, presumably to distinguish themselves from the candidates who ‘don’t like people’. Some watched movies!

Clearly those who had done relevant work experience or a sandwich year stood out from the crowd. My Business School colleague Alistair Beere commented if only we could convince the students of this.

There was some annoyance around the table here at the number of graduates of computer science related degrees who did not have relevant skills. The big surprise was that those who went to the ‘lesser’ Universities (in Liverpool the traditional league is Liverpool, John Moores, Hope, Edge Hill) seemed to have the better skills. Perhaps their lecturers are more in touch with the commercial world than those at the higher brow outfits. It must be frustrating for the student who has paid and studied and are not being rejected by us for a lack of relevant background. I felt frustrated that Universities are sending their graduates out poorly armed to enter their chosen profession. While degrees are not only about employability I am reminded that we must work hard to teach what the students need to know not what we happen to know.
The perception of grade inflation was apparent with most students with 2:2’s being kicked into touch, where degrees were an issue it was considered that if students couldn’t get in the 63% of students now given 2:1’s they were unlikely to be fliers, despite the many fine adjectives they deployed on their C.V’s, it shows that not getting a 2:1 is a problem in the job market.

Interviews later this week, fingers crossed we find the right person, having previously published on this blog how we do interviews interviewing-graduates.html we will have to make a few changes.

I will hopefully take some of the lessons learnt back into my interactions with the various modules I teach on.

Graduation 2011: congratulations to students from the information and PR programmes

2011-07-15T12:16:00.003+01:00

Graduation represents the formal conferment of undergraduate and postgraduate awards. This week LJMU students have been attending the graduation ceremonies at the spectacular Liverpool Anglican Cathedral to receive the ultimate reward for all their academic studies. This includes many students graduating from our information and PR related programmes based at Liverpool Business School, including students graduating from our BSc (Hons) Business Information Systems, BA (Hons) Business Management & Information, BA (Hons) Business & Public Relations, and MA/MSc Information & Library Management.

Members of the successful BA (Hons) Business Management & Information student cohort with lecturers Janet Farrow, Elaine Ansell and Chris Taylor.

Congratulations to all the students graduating from our programmes! We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours!

BSc (Hons) Business Information Systems students celebrate their success!

Andrew Prescott.

Several students achieved the highest academic status by achieving First Class undergraduate degrees, or attaining Distinction at MA/MSc level. A special "well done" goes to these students. However, a further special mention goes to Andrew Prescott, who aside from graduating with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Business Management & Information, received an award for Outstanding Placement Student from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). Andrew's industrial placement was based at General Motors in Luton where he concentrated on Supply Chain Management for a year. Andrew was the only student who had his placement extended, spending two additional months at the Ellesmere Port branch where he spearheaded a project on line side delivery optimisation – finding ways to reduce waste and overall costs of production. Andrew has since secured a two year graduate scheme in the logistics department of Bentley. Well done, Andrew!

BA (Hons) Business & Public Relations students celebrate!

All LJMU graduation ceremonies were streamed live from the Anglican Cathedral and can be watched again at the LJMU website. Information and PR programme ceremonies took place on Wednesday 13 July (AM) and Thursday 14 July (PM). Further information is also available from the LJMU website.

Reinventing the wheel as a square: schema.org

2011-06-07T22:37:00.004+01:00

A few days ago the big three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) announced schema.org. Schema.org is a "collaborative" effort in the area of vocabularies for structured data on the Web and specifies nearly 300 mini-schema that can be used to provide semantics within XHTML. These mini-schema are based on the Microdata specification currently under review as part of the forthcoming HTML5 specification. What? It can be used to "provide semantics"? Don't we have ways of doing this within XHTML already, like RDFa and Microformats?!

Indeed we do...

Schema.org essentially proposes the use of Microdata instead of RDFa (and/or Microformats) and – although derived from the RDF data model – is simpler, less expressive and, as Manu Sporny notes, "exclusive". The announcement has caused a ruckus in the SW blogosphere, particularly from the co-chair of the W3C RDFa Working Group (Sporny) who has declared schema.org to be a "false choice". Even Yahoo!'s resident semantic search technology research guru, Peter Mika – who was part of the team that helped develop schema.org - acknowledges that RDFa would have been preferable because "I consider it more mature and a superior standard to Microdata in many ways". So why has Microdata and a suite of new vocabularies (the mini-schema) been proposed? This appears to be the question many people are asking. Myself included.

Although schema.org cite RDFa complexity and lack of adoption to be motivating factors behind their initiative, both are poor reasons and do not appear to be borne out by the evidence. RDFa can be as expressive as you like, and crucially, it can be just as simple as Microdata. Sporny provides a useful comparison of RDFa and Microdata modelling the same data, as does Gavin Carothers. And a 510% increase in RDFa usage during 2009-2010 does not tend to suggest slow adoption. On the contrary, I blogged about how utterly astonished I was at the uptake. (My early view is that schema.org appears to be motivated more by pure commercial considerations; this seems to be evident from perusing the available mini-schema, many of which are clearly designed to trigger richer results displays for the sale of particular products or services, and/or popular topics with clear commercial potential. SEO consultants are going to clean-up...)

But what probably disappoints most about schema.org is the lack of commitment to re-using existing vocabularies. Isn't that an important aspect of the Semantic Web? Re-use! Minimise duplication! Schema.org duplicates the work of established vocabularies (i.e. RDF Schema) such as FOAF, Dublin Core, the Music Ontology Specification, and many others, and often in a less expressive way. Why re-invent them? But this is part of a more general phenomenon. Rather than harness existing RDF standards that have benefitted from years of developer feedback, research and development, disparate use cases and, essentially, standards that have attempted to deliver what developers have asked for, the search engines have instead declared that they would prefer standards that work better for them. Their vision of structured data is one in which they control the direction of the Semantic Web and not the Semantic Web community, the W3C, or the Web community for that matter. The true impact of schema.org is therefore more philosophical than technical – and not in a good way.

So perhaps the instinctive technical reaction from 'Semantic gurus' is a little melodramatic. Schema.org will change the structured data landscape to be sure, but it is not in the same marketplace as vanilla RDF, doesn't even try to be, and is far less expressive than RDFa. Moreover, the search engines have announced their continued support for RDFa and Microformats - although no mixing of formats, please (!!!). Some, such as Mike Bergman, even see schema.org as a stepping stone for developers; fulfilling a different purpose and encouraging developers to move onto richer forms of structured data. And at least schema.org uses URIs, thus enabling some flexibility on how they are referenced in the future.

It is interesting to note that schema.org was announced a few days prior to the SemTech conference, which kicked-off yesterday in San Francisco. I wonder what the topic of conversation will be at the conference dinner? Well, we can look at Twitter for that...

Visualising (dirty) data from data.gov.uk using the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL)

2011-03-07T22:55:00.005Z

A fortnight ago the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL) was launched by the Public Data Team at Google. DSPL is an XML-based language to support the generation of rich and interactive data visualisations using the Public Data Explorer, Google's hitherto closed visualisation tool. The XML is used to describe the dataset, including informational metadata like descriptions of measures and metrics, as well as structural metadata such as relations between tables. The completed DSPL XML is then uploaded to the Public Data Explorer in a 'dataset bundle' containing a set of CSV files containing the data of the dataset.

I decided to take the DSPL for a spin using data gleaned from data.gov.uk and visualised data pertaining to UK higher education income and expenditure in the years up to 2008 and 2009. This process was a little fidgety, primarily for reasons to be discussed in a moment; but it was also fidgety owing to the demands of the DSPL and the seemingly temperamental nature of the Public Data Explorer. (These technical issues are something the Public Data Team is resolving). The dataset can be visited and enjoyed as a bar graph, bubble chart or line graph, with dimensions selected from the left-hand column and temporal dimensions under the X axis. Bubble metrics in the bubble graph can be toggled in the top right-hand corner. Note that all values are shown in units of 1000 GBP, and where necessary rounded to the nearest 1000 GBP. Screenshots are above and below.

These data visualisations look very good indeed, and this will no doubt be a useful resource for many. But I can't help wondering if it's all too much pain for too little gain. The dataset I used is relatively simple but it still required 140 lines of XML and an endless amount of tinkering with the original data. So unless you have a large, pristine dataset which is to form the focus of a keynote presentation at an important conference (such as Prof. Hans Rosling), it is difficult to see whether it is worth the effort. Added to which, ironing out errors in the DSPL is arduous because the Public Data Explorer is only clever enough to tell you that there is an error, not where the error might be. This is all very frustrating when your XML is well-formed, validates, and your CSV files appear kosher. Again, the Public Data Team is working hard so things should improve soon. Which brings me back to the principal reason why the whole process was fidgety: data.gov.uk.

Data.gov.uk was launched a year ago by Tim Berners-Lee on behalf of the UK government. You can read about the background in your own time. Suffice to say, the raison d'etre of data.gov.uk is to publish government datasets in an open, structured and interoperable way thus stimulating new and "economically and socially valuable applications". As it currently stands, data.gov.uk does not come close to achieving this. It is not until you delve beneath the surface (as I did for the dataset above) that you appreciate what data.gov.uk actually provides is almost the opposite: closed, unstructured and un-interoperable data! A resource like this should be based – in an ideal world – on RDF or XML, with CSV the preferred option for those unfamiliar, unwilling or unable to provide something better. But it should not be a repository for virtually every file format known to human-kind, with contents structured in an arbitrary manner.

Identifying a suitable dataset for my DSPL experiments was exhausting. PDF files are commonplace; some "datasets" are simply empty or broken, or are simply bits of information (e.g. reports). Even if you are lucky enough to find a CSV compliant dataset (and don't expect any RDF or XML), it will inevitably be dirty and require significant time to render it usable, hence why my experiences were fidgety. All of these frustrations appear to be shared by developers that post on the data.gov.uk forum. To be sure the data is "open" insofar as UK citizens can visit data.gov.uk, view data and hold public officials to account. However, it's the data.gov.uk logo (three linked orbs) - which is almost identical to the old Semantic Web logo - that seduces one into thinking data.gov.uk it is a rich source of structured, interoperable, open data. None of this is entirely fair because data.gov.uk does have a page on Linked Data, and it does provide some useful RDF on MPs, legislation, etc. and some SPARQL endpoints; but in the grand scheme of 'all-things-data.gov.uk' it constitutes a very small proportion of what data.gov.uk actually provides. And all of this is very depressing. It increases barriers, alienates the developers and data enthusiasts, and will ultimately fail to reach the objective: "economically and socially valuable applications".

From the bottom up: growing the Semantic Web

2011-02-04T17:51:00.002Z

RDFa is essentially a form of XHTML which incorporates a variety of RDF attributes and can adhere to the RDF data model. It's generally far less detailed than standalone RDF; but it does the trick for most web pages. (See earlier postings for some further information). As a Semantic Web aficionado, I was therefore pleased to read Peter Mika's recent blog concerning the recent growth of RDFa deployment.

Mika is a researcher at Yahoo! Research specialising in semantic search. His research is widely published and his role at Yahoo! has enabled him to analyse the growth of RDFa on the surface web. Mika's analysis charts the evolution of certain microformats and RDFa on the web, as percentage of all web pages, as indexed by Yahoo! Search. This includes over 12 billion web pages. The data collection was conducted at at three different time points over the past two years, thus allowing growth to be charted. There are some caveats with the data, but overall Mika found the following:

"The data shows that the usage of RDFa has increased 510% between March, 2009 and October, 2010, from 0.6% of webpages to 3.6% of webpages (or 430 million webpages in our sample of 12 billion). This is largely thanks to the efforts of the folks at Yahoo! (SearchMonkey), Google (Rich Snippets) and Facebook (Open Graph), all of whom recommend the usage of RDFa. The deployment of microformats has not advanced significantly in the same period, except for the hAtom microformat."

510% growth in 18 months??? What an incredible statistic. It doesn't matter that academics, the BBC, The Guardian, NY Times, data.gov.uk, DBpedia, digital libraries, the CIA, etc. participate in the Semantic Web using 'pure' RDF; it takes Yahoo! (which was leading the search engines in the use of RDFa) and Google (which recently acquired Metaweb Technologies) to motivate ordinary web developers to use RDFa. All of this is very motivating. I wonder where we'll be by October 2011? Hopefully Mika will update his blog sometime in the autumn!

Delicious: an obituary of sorts

2011-01-24T17:12:00.004Z

University bureaucracy was swallowing up my time when this news broke, otherwise I would have commented sooner... But the leaked announcement by Yahoo! that it has decided to 'sunset' Delicious was momentous, and although Delicious may have a future elsewhere, the news remains significant. It's significant because – along with Flickr, which Yahoo! also owns – Delicious was one of the first services which epitomised the new and mysterious 'Web 2.0' concept, when it emerged in 2004.

In 2004 the concept of organising and sharing links on the Web was fresh and new, and Delicious was really the first to offer an innovative solution to save, organise and share bookmarks with friends. Delicious popularised the use of bookmarklets and practically coined the term 'social bookmarking'. It was probably the first Web 2.0 service to make a domain hack cool and not cheap looking (it was http://del.icio.us/ until 2008, and actually called itself del.icio.us initially).

More interestingly, Delicious popularised tagging and – probably more than any other service at that time – launched an avenue of functionality known as 'social tagging'. In the deluge of social tagging research papers that have been published since Delicious was launched, few will not have cited Delicious within its introduction. And, of course, social tagging - or social bookmarking, or collaborative tagging - has come to be one of the defining aspects of Web 2.0. Social tagging has sent shock waves throughout the Web, influencing the design of subsequent social media services and discovery tools, such as digital libraries. Even the ubiquitous (and infamous) tag cloud - which sister service Flickr invented - was adopted by Delicious and rendered infinitely more useful with the uniquely identifiable resources it and its users curated.

And all of the aforementioned was why Yahoo! decided to acquire Delicious in late 2005 for circa $30 million, in what commentators noted as the first attempt by a Web 1.0 company to jump on to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Of course, since 2005 many of the original Web 2.0 names have found a Web 1.0 home in which to evolve (e.g. Delicious and Flickr @ Yahoo!; YouTube, Picasa, Blogger @ Google; MySpace @ News Corp; etc.). To be sure, Yahoo! paid too much for Delicious; but Yahoo! weren't buying the technology (which at the time of purchase wasn't particularly complex). They were buying the brand, its users and the Web 2.0 kudos. However, Yahoo! failed to capitalise on all of that, and even failed to harness the underlying technology to make Delicious a household name. One would have thought that an injection of Yahoo! R&D would have made Delicious the most innovative social bookmaking service available, with plenty of horizontal integration with other Yahoo! products. Far from innovating, Delicious has been static since its acquisition. Five years on there are numerous social bookmarking services, virtually all of which are more innovative, more exciting and ultimately more useful.

It is an end of an era to be sure. No-one talks about 'Web 2.0' any more because there is no Web 2.0 to point to, and the demise of Delicious is an example of this. Web 2.0 is now about a handful of social media behemoths. To some extent the 'sunsetting' of Delicious is a comment on the utility of tagging and the value that can be mined from tags, and, ergo, the money that can be made from them. Tightening the use of tags is something which has attracted more attention recently from the CommonTag initiative and rival social bookmarking services such as Faviki and ZigTag. TechCrunch suggest that Yahoo! could have made money from Delicious if they had wanted to and that organisational issues prevented Delicious from being profitable. Perhaps they are right. Only a small team would have been required - but it can't have been easy to make money otherwise Yahoo! would have done it. The moment for Delicious is now gone... And this is an obituary of sorts: can you see any company thinking Delicious is a good investment?

New undergraduate degree programme: BSc Business Communications at LJMU

2010-11-15T16:10:00.001Z

This blog tends to focus on research and often comments on how technological developments will alter the management of information and the computation of data. Occasionally, however, we also discuss issues within the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees (and modules) our team happens to deliver. It is therefore worthwhile announcing to all those who read the blog that our team has launched a new undergraduate degree programme for 2011: BSc Business Communications.

In BSc Business Communications at LJMU (UCAS Code: N102) students will study the strategic importance of communication, information and technology, and the role these play in the modern business organisation. Further information on the new programme can be found at our standalone BSc Business Communications website, the official LJMU BSc Business Communications website, or our Facebook group (BSc Business Communications at LJMU). BSc Business Communications is recruiting now for 2011/2012.

Crowd-sourcing faceted information retrieval

2010-11-02T11:11:00.005Z

This blog has witnessed the demise of several search engines, all of which have attempted to challenge the supremacy of the big innovators - and I would tend to include Yahoo! and Bing before the obvious market leader. Yesterday it was the turn of Blekko to be the next Cuil. Or is it?

Blekko presents a fresh attempt to move web search forward, using a style of retrieval which has hitherto only been successful in systems based on pre-coordinated indexes and combining it with crowd-sourcing techniques. Interestingly, Rich Skrenta - co-founder of Blekko - was also a principal founder of the Dmoz project. Remember Dmoz? When I worked on BUBL years and years ago, I recall considering Dmoz to be an inferior beast. But it remains alive and kicking – and remains popular and relevant to modern web developments with weekly RDF dumps made of its rich, categorised, crowd-sourced content for Linked Data purposes. BUBL, on the other hand, has been static for years.

Flirting with taxonomical organisation and categorisation with Dmoz (as well as crowd-sourcing) has obviously influenced the Blekko approach to search. Blekko provides innovation in retrieval by enabling users to define their very own vertical search indexes using so-called 'slashtags', thus (essentially) providing a quasi form of faceted search. The advantage of this approach is that using a particular slashtag (or facet, if you prefer) in a query increases precision by removing 'irrelevant' results associated with different meanings of the search query terms. Sounds good, eh? Ranganathan would be salivating at such functionality in automatic indexing! To provide some form of critical mass, Blekko has provided hundreds of slashtags that can be used straight away; but the future of slashtags depends on users creating their own, which will be screened by Blekko before being added to their publicly available slashtags list. Blekko users can also assist in weeding out poor results and any erroneous slashtags results (see the video below) thus contributing to the improved precision Blekko purports to have and maintaining slashtag efficacy. In fact, Skrenta proposes that the Blekko approach will improve precision in the longer term. Says Skrenta on the BBC dot.Maggie blog:

"The only way to fix this [precision problem] is to bring back large-scale human curation to search combined with strong algorithms. You have to put people into the mix […] Crowdsourcing is the only way we will be able to allow search to scale to the ever-growing web".

Let's look at a typical Blekko query. I am interested in the new Microsoft Windows mobile OS, and in bona fide reviews of the new OS. Moreover, since I am tech savvy and will have read many reviews, I am only interested in reviews published recently (i.e. within the past two weeks, or so). In Blekko we can search like so…

"windows mobile 7" /tech-reviews /date

…where the /tech-reviews slashtag limits results to genuine reviews published in the technology press and/or associated websites, and the /date slashtag orders the results by date. It works, and works spectacularly well. Skrenta sticks two fingers up at his competitors when in the Blekko promotional video he quips, "Try doing this [type of] search anywhere else!" Blekko provides 'Five use cases where slashtags shine' which - although only using one slashtag - illustrate how the approach can be used in a variety of different queries. Of course, Blekko can still be used like a conventional search engine, e.g. enter a query and get results ranked according to the Blekko algorithm. And on this count – using my own personal 'search engine test queries' - Blekko appears to rank relevant results sensibly and index pages which other search engines either ignore or, if they do index them, normally drown in spam (spam results which these engines rank as more relevant).

There is a lot to admire about Blekko. Aside from an innovative approach to information retrieval, there is also a commitment to algorithm openness and transparency which SEO people will be pleased about; but I worry that while a Blekko slashtag search is innovative and useful, most users will approach Blekko as another search engine rather than buying into the importance of slashtags and, in doing so will not hang around long enough to 'get it' (even though I intend to...). Indeed, to some extent Blekko has more in common with command line searching of the online databases in the days of yore. There are also some teething troubles which rigorous testing can reveal. But there are reasons to be hopeful. Blekko is presumably hoping to promote slashtag popularity and have users following slashtags just as users follow Twitter groups, thus driving website traffic and presumably advertising. Being the owner of that slashtag could be useful, but also highly profitable, even if Blekko remains small.

blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.

New Google

2010-09-22T19:52:00.002+01:00

My interest in information retrieval means that subscribing to search engine blogs (among other things) is essential. The most active blog to which I subscribe is the Official Google Blog. According to Google, the OGB provides "insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture". More simply, the OGB is the place to look for developments in search, particularly those which Google wants to shout about.

There was a time (probably around two years ago) when updates to the OGB occurred every other week, and often the receipt of the RSS feed would compel me to post to this blog, such were the gravity of OGB announcements (see this, this and this, for example). However, in the past six months the OGB has been in overdrive. Almost every day a huge Google announcement is made on the OGB, whether it's the announcement of Google Instant or significant developments to Google Docs. Enter Google New, a new dedicated website to find all things new from Google. Here's the rationale from Google as published – yup, you guessed it – on the OGB:

"If it seems to you like every day Google releases a new product or feature, well, it seems like that to us too. The central place we tell you about most of these is through the official Google Blog Network [...] But if you want to keep up just with what’s new (or even just what Google does besides search), you’ll want to know about Google New. A few of us had a 20 percent project idea: create a single destination called Google New where people could find the latest product and feature launches from Google. It’s designed to pull in just those posts from various blogs."

Makes sense I suppose, eh?

Web Teaching Day - 6 Sep 2010

2010-09-09T13:39:00.005+01:00

On Monday, 6 Sept 2010 I attended a Web Teaching Day organised by Richard Eskins from Manchester Metropolitan University (his blog). We do a fair amount of web teaching in this group so I thought it would be useful to go along. Web teaching is undertaken by the Computing Department or the Art / Design department in most Universities and our courses tend to be very business orientated.

In many ways the conversations I had reminded me of those we have regarding Information Systems at John Moores. There's a problem relating to the range of skills required from basic technical skills, through design skills to high level inter personal skills. Our aim is to produce a "hybrid" graduate combining business with systems / technical skills. There's huge demand in industry for these graduates and our best students command very high salaries but students find the work hard and it difficult to recruit good students.

Web design / development courses have very similar aims.

Some of the highlights of the day:

Chris Mills from Opera talked about the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. He's been producing teaching material for students all of which is freely available on the internet. He also talked about Mozilla's P2PU (Peer to Peer University) programme - School of Webcraft which is aimed at delivering and assessing these skills. He's co-author on Interact with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design (Voices That Matter).

David Watson from Greenwich University talked about the course he designed and runs - MA in Web Design and Content Planning. They've produced their own site to support the course. One interesting point he made is that he reckoned that this site had increased applicants to the course significantly, they now have 60 applicants for 20 places whereas before they struggled for numbers. He published his presentation here. He had some interesting observations on setting up and running the course. In particular don't depend on the University to market and recruit students to your course, you may end up with no students.

Christopher Murphy and Nik Persson (also known as the Web Standardistas) talked about their course BSc (Hons) Interactive Multimedia Design at Ulster University and the issues involved in delivering to undergraduates. I particularly liked their use of the nerd (Bill Gates) - designer (Steve Jobs) continuum to describe the difficulties of being a web builder and how you need so many disparate skills along this path. Here are some of the tools they recommend. Their book is HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach.

Aesha Zafar from the BBC talked about the new developments in Manchester and, in particular, the jobs that will be created there and Nicola Critchlow talked about the gap between industry's needs and graduates being produced by Universities (which is large and getting larger, nothing new there).

Finally, Andy Clarke, a freelance designer led a group discussion and chat at the end.

So what skills does a graduate from a web design / development course need? This is my list based on the nerd - designer continuum:

databases
server side programming languages (PHP seems to be in vogue though there are others)
Javascript
CSS
HTML including web development tools
graphics
design
people skills

It was an excellent day with lots of really inspiring speakers and it really got me fired up about the possibilities of delivering a web design / development course at John Moores. I don't believe that the course I want to offer exists here (though that's based on absolutely no research whatsoever!).

Our team has really strong skills in databases, programming, HTML, CSS and Javascript and we teach most of these skills at various levels. The people skills elements are taught throughout all our courses and is embedded in all JMU programmes via the World of Work (WoW) programme.

Our weakness is in design / graphics, however, Liverpool School of Art & Design has huge experience in areas such as graphic design and digital media.

So, here's a great opportunity to collaborate on a new course in an area that is growing in popularity.

Musical experiments with HTML5

2010-08-30T17:07:00.005+01:00

The Official Google blog has just announced an HTML5 Chrome Experiment in association with Canadian indie rock band, Arcade Fire. This experiment appears to function as a marketing exercise for both Chrome and Arcade Fire; although it does also demonstrate that Google has a commitment to HTML5 (and it appears to be part of a wider partnership with Arcade Fire, as the video below indicates).

HTML5 is still currently under development but is the next major revision of the HTML standard (as distinct from the recent incorporation of RDF, i.e. XHTML+RDFa). HTML5 will still be optimised for structuring and presenting content on the Web; however, it includes numerous new elements to better incorporate multimedia (which is currently heavily dependent on third party plug-ins), drag and drop functionality, improved support for semantic microdata, among many, many other things...

The Chrome Experiment entitled, 'The Wilderness Downtown', uses a variety of HTML5 building blocks. In their words:

"Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all. "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait" and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas."

Being an 'experiment' it can be a little over the top, and I suppose it isn't an accurate reflection of how HTML5 will be used in practice. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth checking out - and I was quite impressed with canvas. An HTML5 compliant browser is required, as well as some time (it took 7 minutes to load!!!).

Jimmy Reid and the public library: an education like no other

2010-08-23T10:47:00.012+01:00

Jimmy Reid was laid to rest last week. The obituaries have been plentiful and praising. As someone who is interested in the industrial history of Britain, I have always been especially interested in the industrial heritage of my home town of Glasgow (as well as my adopted home of Liverpool), and my special interest in Glasgow shipbuilding made Jimmy Reid's passing all the more sad...


Poster of shipyard workers at Titan. Image: G.Macgregor, CC rights.

The size of shipbuilding on the Clyde back in the glory days is today unimaginable. Several industrial cities in the UK had shipyards, Merseyside included; but just as Liverpool eclipsed all other cities as a port in the Victorian period, so Glasgow and the Clyde eclipsed all others in shipbuilding during the same era, producing 30,000 ships during 19th and 20th centuries. This equated to a third of all ships in the entire world, more than all the shipyards in Britain combined. It's a staggering statistic and earned Glasgow the title of "shipbuilding capital of the world".

I recently visited the former site of John Brown & Company Shipbuilders. The builder of choice for Cunard Line, John Brown was one of the 40 shipyards that prospered on the Clyde and produced some of the most famous vessels the world has ever seen. The Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, the Lusitania, the Aquitania, the Britannia, HMS Hood, the QE2 – they were all built there. And although it's been turned into an excellent tourist attraction with the help of EU funding, it remains a tragically haunting place. 100 hectares of open space. The largest of the slipways remain, upon which the QE2 would have been launched into the Clyde for fitting out. The classic Titan cantilever crane has been restored too, giving a tiny glimpse of the scale and sheer majesty of the vessels being built at the yard. But it was in the final years of the 'good times' at the shipyards that Jimmy Reid grew up.

RMS Queen Mary at Long Beach, California, now serving as a museum and hotel. Image: WPPilot, Wikimedia Commons, CC rights.

Reid was many things in his time, including a trade unionist, communist, Labour Party member, journalist and Rector of the University of Glasgow; however, he rose to international prominence in the early 1970s leading the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) 'work-in' at Govan, Glasgow. The good times were over for British heavy industry, and this included marine engineering on the Clyde too. Increasing competition from abroad and a lack of investment meant that the yards increasingly required a state subsidy to complete their orders. UCS had gone into receivership and the Conservative government (led by Edward Heath) had decided that UCS - itself an amalgamation of five major Clyde shipyards several years earlier - should operate without state subsidy. The removal of these subsidies would immediately extinguish at least 6,000 jobs. Rather than adopt traditional forms of industrial action (e.g. strikes, sit-ins, etc.), the union leadership - spearheaded by Reid - decided to stage a 'work-in'. The union leadership were determined to complete the existing order book of ships and complete them to their traditional high levels of craftsmanship. Only this way would they dispel the myth of the 'work-shy' shipbuilder; only this way would they demonstrate their superior work ethic, project the best image to the British public, and demonstrate the viability of the yards. Said Reid famously, when addressing the shipyard workers:

"We are not going to strike. We are not even having a sit-in strike. Nobody and nothing will come in and nothing will go out without our permission. And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, and with dignity, and with maturity."

This unique industrial action had integrity and was successful in the short-term, attracting international attention, sympathy and financial support (most notably from John Lennon and Yoko Ono). It is also why BAE Systems today have two ex-UCS yards on the Clyde, currently building the brand new high-end Type 45 Destroyers for the Royal Navy. Ultimately though, shipbuilding in Glasgow and on the Clyde today is a shade of its former self.

Titan cantilever crane at the former John Brown shipyard, Clydebank. Image: G.Macgregor, CC. rights

Jimmy Reid was born into a shipbuilding family. He left school at the age of 14 and pursued an apprenticeship in shipyard engineering. Despite leaving school with the minimum education possible, Reid went on to become one of the most talented political figures, orators, political thinkers and political leaders in British politics. He was fascinated by politics, reading about it constantly and studying political texts in the local public library almost every day. Sir Alex Ferguson – always astonished at Reid's knowledge - said at Reid's funeral:

"Our education was football, his education was the Govan library. He was never out of there."

Public libraries are often considered "the people's university". When Reid was made Rector of the University of Glasgow, "pompous" academics would ask which university he attended, to which Reid would reply: "Govan Library"! The public library moulded Reid, provided an education like no other and helped him develop an intellect which Sir Michael Parkinson described as "formidable". Reid personified the public library mission of education and lifelong learning available to all, regardless of age, skill level, or ability to pay. I have many issues with the running of public libraries today (some of which I might discuss in a future blog), but their importance in creating people like Jimmy Reid across Britain, and elsewhere in the world, can never be forgotten. And I'm not necessarily talking about people of Reid's political persuasion; but the importance of providing fantastic opportunities for education, enlightenment and betterment – and escape. The wealth of the Govan area during its shipbuilding heyday is reflected in its public buildings. The magnificent Town Hall, for example, with its neo-classical decoration, overlooking the quasi-futuristic architecture of Glasgow's redeveloped waterfront (and now used as a recording HQ for Franz Ferdinand). And Govan Public Library (or Elder Park Library as it is officially known) is no exception; a beautiful Victorian listed building situated within Elder Park. What a great location to build a public library; inviting local residents to escape the noise and dirt of shipbuilding and marine engineering to enjoy its salubrious surroundings and architectural splendour while reading an improving book! The Victorians had style - and they recognised the importance of the public library as an institution.

Elder Park Library, front elevation. Image: mike.thomson75.

It is a dangerous time for public libraries. Because they are such established institutions, people often take for granted that they will always exist, come rain or shine. Yet, the role of public libraries as the people's university remains as important as ever, not only to promote social inclusion and enable vulnerable people in society to engage with civil society, but providing opportunities for lifelong learning in dire economic circumstances. If some should go, where will the Jimmy Reids of tomorrow go? Some will argue that the increased penetration of broadband (circa 65%) makes some public libraries dispensable, but what about the remaining 35%, or those that are suddenly made redundant and can no longer afford their broadband bill? Where do they go if they want to develop knowledge in a particular discipline, or learn about IT? And just because someone has broadband does not mean that they can get access to all the information they might require (bibliographic databases?), or that the information will be any good. The Telegraph reckons Jimmy Reid's life would make a great biopic. I agree, so long as the splendour of Elder Park Library is maintained and we have plenty clips of Jimmy perusing the book stacks.

Where are the WarGames students?

2010-08-19T10:11:00.002+01:00

This morning I happened to enjoy "What's the point of ..." on BBC Radio 4. Motivated by an imminent spending review and inevitable cuts – as well as recent celebrations concerning the Battle of Britain – Quentin Letts put the RAF under some scrutiny. What's the point of the RAF in 2010? The issues and debates are well rehearsed, e.g. Are über futuristic fighter jets required for the conflicts the UK is likely to be engaged in? The outcome of the debate was inconclusive because few people can predict the types of conflicts that may emerge in the future.

One type of warfare which all commentators agreed was potentially imminent is cyber warfare. Not only is such warfare potentially imminent, but the UK (along with other NATO allies) is completely unprepared for a sophisticated or sustained attack. According to the programme only 24 people at the MoD are actively working on cyber security(!). Commentators agreed that funding had to be diverted from other armed services (i.e. RAF) to invest in cyber security. This means more advanced computing and information professionals to improve cyber security, but also to operate un-manned drones, manipulate intelligence data, and so forth. 'More Bill Gates-type recruits and fewer soldiers' was the message.

Although it wasn't given treatment in the programme, the conundrum for our cyber security – as well as our economy - is the declining numbers of students seeking to study computing science and information science at undergraduate/postgraduate level. This is a decline which is reflected more generally in the lack of school leaver interest in science and technology, something which – unless you have been living in a cave – the last Labour government and the current coalition are attempting to address. With the release of A-level results today and the massive demand for university places this year, some universities have been boosted by government grants designed to recruit extra students in science and technology. The coalition, in particular, sees it as a way of improving economic growth prospects; but it seems that the need to reverse this trend has become even more urgent given that we only have a small mini-bus full of 'cyber soldiers' – and, let's face it, five are probably on part-time contracts, two will be on maternity leave and one will be on long term sick leave.

It's a far cry from the 1980s Hollywood classic, 'WarGames' (1983). WarGames follows a young hacker (Matthew Broderick) who inadvertently accesses a US military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Taking advantage of the unbelievably simple command language interface ("Can we play a global thermonuclear simulation game?" types Broderick) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) light years ahead 2010 state of the art, Broderick manages to initiate a nuclear war simulation believing it to be an innocent computer game. Of course, Broderick's shenanigans cause US military panic and almost cause World War III. I remember going to the petrol station with my father to rent WarGames on VHS as soon as it was available (yes – in the early 1980s petrol stations were often the place to go for video rentals! I suppose the video revolution was just kicking off...) and being thoroughly inspired by its depiction of computing and hacking. I wanted to be a hacker and was lucky enough to receive an Atari 800XL that Christmas, although programming soon gave way to gaming. Pac-Man anyone? Missile Command was pretty good too...

The end of social networking or just the beginning?

2010-07-26T17:34:00.006+01:00

Today the Guardian's Digital Content blog carries an article by Charles Arthur in which we waxes lyrical about the fact that social networking - as a technological and social phenomenon - has reached its apex. As Arthur writes:

"I don't think anyone is going to build a social network from scratch whose only purpose is to connect people. We've got Facebook (personal), LinkedIn (business) and Twitter (SMS-length for mobile)."

Huh. Maybe he's right? The monopolisation of the social networking market is rather unfortunate and, I suppose, rather unhealthy - but it is probably and ultimately necessary owing to the current business models of social media (i.e. you've got to have a gargantuan user base to turn a profit). The 'big three' (above) have already trampled over the others to get to the top out of necessity.

However, Arthur's suggestion is that 'standalone' social networking websites are dead, rather than social networking itself. Social networking will, of course, continue; but it will be subsumed into other services as part of a package. How successful these will be is anyone's guess. This situation is contrary to what many commentators forecast several years ago. Commentators predicted an array of competing social networks, some highly specialised and catering for niche interests. Some have already been and gone; some continue to limp on, slowly burning the cash of venture capitalists. Researchers also hoped - and continue to hope - for open applications making greater use of machine readable data on foaf:persons using, erm, FOAF.

The bottom line is that it's simply too difficult to move social networks. For a variety reasons, Identi.ca is generally acknowledged to be an improvement on Twitter, offering greater functionality and open-source credentials (FOAF support anyone?); but persuading people to move is almost impossible. Moving results in a loss of social capital and users' labour, hence recent work in metadata standards to export your social networking capital. Yet, it is not in the interests of most social networks to make users' data portable. Monopolies are therefore always bound to emerge.

But is privacy the elephant in the room? Arthur's article omits the privacy furore which has pervaded Facebook in recent months. German data protection officials have launched a legal assault on Facebook for accessing and saving the personal data of people who don't even use the network, for example. And I would include myself in the group of people one step away from deleting his Facebook account. Enter diaspora: diaspora (what a great name for a social network!) is a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network". The diaspora team vision is very exciting and inspirational. These are, after all, a bunch of NYU graduates with an average age of 20.5 and ace computer hacking skills. Scheduled for a September 2010 launch, diaspora will be a piece of open-source personal web server software designed to enable a distributed and decentralised alternative to services such as Facebook. Nice. So, contrary to Arthur's article, there are a new, innovative, standalone social networks emerging and being built from scratch. diaspora has immense momentum and taps into the increasing suspicion that users have of corporations like Facebook, Google and others.

Sadly, despite the exciting potential of diaspora, I fear they are too late. Users are concerned about privacy. It is a misconception to think that they aren't; but valuing privacy over social capital is a difficult choice for people that lead a virtual existence. Jettison five years of photos, comments, friendships, etc. or tolerate the privacy indiscretions of Facebook (or other social networks)? That's the question that users ask themselves. It again comes down to data portability and the transfer of social capital and/or user labour. diaspora will, I am sure, support many of the standards to make data portability possible, but will Facebook make it possible to output and export your data to diaspora? Probably not. I nevertheless watch the progress of diaspora closely and I hope, just hope they can make it a success. Good luck, chaps!

Google finally gets serious about the Semantic Web?

2010-07-19T20:36:00.002+01:00

Google has been flirting with the Semantic Web recently, and we've talked about it occasionally on this blog. However, compared with other web search engines (e.g. Yahoo!) and the state of Semantic Web activity generally, Google has been slow to dive in completely. They have restricted themselves to rich snippets, using bits of RDFa and microformats, and making up their own too. Perhaps this was because their intention was always to purchase a prominent Semantic Web start-up company instead of putting in the spade work themselves? Perhaps so.

Google has this week announced the purchase of Metaweb Technologies. None the wiser?! Metaweb is perhaps most known for providing the Semantic Web community with Freebase. Freebase cropped up last year on this blog when we discussed the emergence of Common Tags. Freebase essentially represents a not insignificant hub in the rapidly expanding Linked Data cloud, providing RDF data on 12 million entities with URIs linking to other linked and Semantic Web datasets, e.g. DBpedia.

My comments are limited to the above; just thought this was probably an extremely important development and one to watch. A high level of social proof appears to be required before some tech firms or organisations will embrace the Semantic Web. But what greater social proof than Google? Google also appear committed to the Freebase ethos:

"[We] plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users."

Very significant stuff indeed.

iStrain?

2010-07-13T11:55:00.006+01:00

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen published details of a brief (but interesting) usability study on his Alertbox website last week. Nielsen was interested in exploring the differences that might exist between people reading long-form text on tablets and other devices. To be clear, this wasn't about testing the usability of devices per se; more about 'readability'.

Nielsen's research motivation was clear: e-book readers and tablets are finally growing in popularity and they are likely to become an important means of engaging in long-form reading in the future. However, such devices will only succeed if they are better than reading from PC or laptop screens and - the mother of all reading devices - the printed book. Nielsen and his assistants therefore performed a readability study of tablets, including the Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle, and compared these with books. You can read the article in full in your own time. It's a brief read at circa 1000 words. Essentially, Nielsen's key findings were that reading from a book is significantly quicker than reading from tablet devices. Reading from the iPad was found to be 6.2% slower and the Kindle 10.7% slower.

I recall ebook readers emerging in the late 1990s. At that time ebook readers were mysterious but exciting devices. After some above average ebook sales for a Stephen King best seller in 1999/2000 (I think), it was predicted that ebook readers would take over the publishing industry. But they didn't. The reasons for this were/are complex but pertain to a variety of factors including conflicting technologies, lack of interoperability, poor usability and so forth. There were additional issues, many of which some of my ex-colleagues investigated with their EBONI project. One of the biggest factors inhibiting their proliferation was the issue of eye strain. The screens on early ebook readers lacked sufficient resolution and were simply small computer screens which came with the associated eye strain issues for long-form reading, e.g. glare, soreness of the eyes, headaches, etc. Long-form reading was simply too unpleasant; which is why the emergence of the Kindle, with its use of e-ink, was revelatory. The Kindle - and readers like it - have been able to simulate the printed word such that eye strain issues are no longer an issue.

Nielsen has already attracted criticism regarding flaws in his methodology; but in his defence he did not purport his study to be rigorously scientific, nor has he sought publication of his research in the peer-reviewed research literature. He wrote up his research in 1000 words for his website, for goodness sake! In any case, his results were to be expected. Applegeeks will complain that he didn't use enough participants, although those familiar with the realities of academic research will know that 30-40 participant user studies are par for the course. However, there is one assumption in Nielsen's article which is problematic and which has evaded discussion: iStrain. Yes - it's a dreadful pun but it strikes at the heart of whether these devices are truly readable or not. Indeed, how conducive can a tablet or reader be for long-form reading if your retinas are bleeding after 50 minutes reading? Participants in Nielsen's experiment were reading for around 17 minutes. Says Nielsen:

"On average, the stories took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read. This is obviously less time than people might spend reading a novel or a college textbook, but it's much longer than the abrupt reading that characterizes Web browsing. Asking users to read 17 minutes or more is enough to get them immersed in the story. It's also representative for many other formats of interest, such as whitepapers and reports."

...All of which is true, sort of. But in order to assess long-form reading participants need to be reading for a lot, lot longer than 17 minutes, and whilst the iPad enjoys a high screen resolution and high levels of user satisfaction, how conducive can it be to long-form reading? And herein lies a problem. The iPad was never really designed as an e-reader. It is a multi-purpose mobile device which technology commentators - contrary to all HCI usability and ergonomics research - seem to think is ideally suited to long-form reading. It may rejuvenate the newspaper industry since this form of consumption is similar to that explained above

by Nielsen, but the iPad is ultimately no different to the failed e-reading technologies of ten years ago. In fact, some might say it is worse. I mean, would you want to read P.G. Wodehouse through smudged fingerprints?! The results of Nielsen's study are therefore interesting but they could have been more informative had participants been reading for longer. A follow up study is order of the day and would be ideally suited to an MSc dissertation. Any student takers?!

(Image (eye): Vernhart, Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic)
(Image (beware): florian.b, Flickr, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic)

Love me, connect me, Facebook me

2010-06-28T15:00:00.001+01:00

This is just a quick post to alert readers to the recent existence of a dedicated MA/MSc/PG Dip. Information & Library Management Facebook group page. The page is for current and prospective ILM students, but should also prove useful to alumni and enable networking between former students and/or other information professionals.

Being a Facebook group page it is accessible to everyone; however, those of you with Facebook accounts can become fans to be kept abreast of programme news, events, research activity, industry developments and so forth. Click the "Like it!" button!

(Image: Luc Legay, Flickr, Creative Commons)

Visualising the metadata universe

2010-06-23T09:39:00.000+01:00

No blog postings for almost three months and then two come along at once... I thought it would be worth drawing to the attention of readers the recent work of Jenn Riley of Indiana University. Jenn is currently metadata guru for the Indiana University Digital Library Program and yesterday on the Dublin Core list she announced the output of a project to build a conceptual model of the 'metadata universe'.

As evidenced by some of my blogs, there are literally hundreds of metadata standards and structured data formats available, all with their own acronym. This seems to have become more complicated with the emergence of numerous XML based standards in the early to mid noughties, and the more recent proliferation of RDF vocabularies for the Semantic Web and the associated Linked Data drive. What formats exists? How do they relate to each other? For which communities of practice are they optimised, e.g. information industry or cultural sector? What are the metadata, technical standards, vocabularies that I should be congnisant of in my area? And so the question list goes on...

These questions can be difficult to answer, and it is for this reason that Jenn Riley has produced a gigantic poster diagram (above) entitled, 'Seeing standards: a visualization of the metadata universe'. The diagram achieves what a good model should, i.e. simplifying complex phenomena and presenting a large volume of information in a condensed way. As the website blurb states:

"Each of the 105 standards listed here is evaluated on its strength of application to defined categories in each of four axes: community, domain, function, and purpose. The strength of a standard in a given category is determined by a mixture of its adoption in that category, its design intent, and its overall appropriateness for use in that category."

A useful conceptual tool for academics, practitioners and students alike. A glossary of metadata standards in either poster or pamphlet form is also available.

Goulash all round: Linked Data at NSZL

2010-06-22T19:06:00.005+01:00

I meant to blog about this as soon as the news emerged in mid-April but University bureaucracy and research project demands prevented it: Adam Horvath (Director of Informatics) at the The National Széchényi Library (NSZL) (or National Library of Hungary, if you prefer) announced on the Semantic Web Linking Open Data Project email list that the NSZL have exposed their entire OPAC and digital library as Linked Data - that's correct, their entire OPAC and digital library has been published as Linked Data. This includes corresponding authority data, with all nodes represented using Cool URIs.

The RDF vocabularies used include Dublin Core RDF for bibliographic metadata, SKOS for subject indexing (in a variety of terminologies) and FOAF for name authority data. Incredible! Not only that, the FOAF descriptions include mapped owl:sameAs statements to corresponding dbpedia URIs. For example, here is FOAF data pertaining to Hungarian novelist, Jókai Mór:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:dbpedia="http://dbpedia.org/property/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:zs="http://www.loc.gov/zing/srw/">
<foaf:Person rdf:about="http://nektar.oszk.hu/resource/auth/33589">
<dbpedia:deathYear>1904</dbpedia:deathYear>
<dbpedia:birthYear>1825</dbpedia:birthYear>
<foaf:familyName>Jókai</foaf:familyName>
<foaf:givenName>Mór</foaf:givenName>
<foaf:name>Jókai Mór (1825-1904)</foaf:name>
<foaf:name>Mór Jókai</foaf:name>
<foaf:name>Jókai Mór</foaf:name>
<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/resource/M%C3%B3r_J%C3%B3kai"/>
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

Visit the above noted dbpedia data for fun.

Rich SKOS data is also available for a local information retrieval thesaurus. Follow this link for an example of the skos:prefLabel ' magyar irodalom'.

It's a herculean effort from the NSZL which must be commended. And before the Germans did it too! Goulash all round to celebrate - and a photograph of the Hungarian Parliament, methinks.

Social media and the organic farmer

2010-03-30T14:59:00.002+01:00

The latest Food Programme was broadcast yesterday by BBC Radio 4 and made for some interesting listening. (Listen again at iPlayer.) In it Sheila Dillon visited the Food and Drink Expo 2010 at the Birmingham NEC and, rather than discussing the food, her focus was encapsulated in the programme slogan, 'To Tweet or not to Tweet', which was also the name of a panel debate at the Expo. Twitter was not the principal programme focus though. The programme explored social media generally and its use by small farmers and food producers to communicate with customers.

There were some interesting discussions about the fact that online grocery sales grew by 15% last year (three times more than 'traditional' grocery sales) and the role of the web and social media in the disintermediation of supermarkets as the principal means of getting 'artisan foods' to market. Some great success stories were discussed, such as Rude Health and the recently launched Virtual Farmers' Market. However, the familiar problem which the programme highlighted – and the problem which has motivated this blog posting – is the issue of measuring the impact and effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool. Most small businesses had little idea how effective their social media 'strategies' had been and, by the sounds of it, many are randomly tweeting, blogging and setting up Facebook groups in a vein attempt to gain market traction. One commentator (Philip Lynch, Director of Media Evaluation) from Kantar Media Intelligence spoke about tracking "text footprints" left by users on the social web which can then be quantified to determine the level support for a particular product or supplier. He didn't say much more than that, probably because Kantar's own techniques for measuring impact are a form of intellectual property. It sounds interesting though and I would be keen to see it action.

But the whole reason for the 'To Tweet or not to Tweet' discussion in the first place was to explore the opportunities to be gleaned by 'artisan food' producers using social media. These are traditionally small businesses with few capital resources and for whom social media presents a free opportunity to reach potential customers. Yet, the underlying (but barely articulated) theme of many discussions on the Food Programme was that serious investment is required for a social media strategy to be effective. The technology is free to use but it involves staff resource to develop a suitable strategy, and a staff resource with the communications and technical knowledge. On top of all this, small businesses want to be able to observe the impact of their investment on sales and market penetration. Thus, in the end, it requires outfits like Kantor to orchestrate a halfway effective social media strategy, maintain it, and to measure it. Anything short of this will not necessarily help drive sales and may be wholly ineffective. (I can see how social media aficionado Keith Thompson arrived at a name for his blog – any thoughts on this stuff, Keith?) The question therefore presents itself: Are food artisans, or any small business for that matter, being suckered by the false promise of free social media?

Of course, most of the above is predicated upon the assumption that people like me will continue to use social media such as Facebook; but while it continues to update its privacy policy, as it suggested this week on its blog that it will, I will be leaving social media altogether. 'Opting in' for a basic level of privacy should not be necessary.

Students' information literacy: three events collide with cosmic significance...

2010-03-29T15:54:00.003+01:00

Three random – but related – events collided last week, as if part of some cosmic information literacy solar system...

Firstly, I completed marking student submissions for Business Information Management (LBSIS1036). This is a level one module which introduces web technologies to students; but it is also a module which introduces information literacy skills. These skills are tested in an in-lab assessment in which students can demonstrate their ability to critically evaluate information, ascertain provenance, IPR, etc. To assist them the students are introduced to evaluation methodologies in the sessions preceding the assessment which they can use to test the provenance of information sources found on the 'surface web'.

Students' performance in the assessment was patchy. Those students that invested a small amount of time studying found themselves with marks within the 2:1 to First range; but sadly most didn't invest the preparation time and found themselves in the doldrums, or failing altogether. What was most revealing about their performance was the fact that – despite several taught sessions outlining appropriate information evaluation methodologies – a large proportion of students informed me in their manuscripts that their decision to select a resource was not because i t fulfilled particular aspects of their evaluation criteria, but because the resource featured in the top five results within Google and therefore must be reliable. Indeed, the evaluation criteria were dismissed by many students in favour of the perceived reliability of Google's PageRank to provide a resource which is accurate, authoritative, objective, current, and with appropriate coverage. Said one student in response to 'Please describe the evaluation criteria used to assess the provenance of the resource selected': "The reason I selected this resource is that it features within the top five results on Google and therefore is a trustworthy source of information".

Aside from the fact these students completely missed the point of the assessment and clearly didn't learn anything from Chris Taylor or me, it strikes fear in the heart of a man that these students will continue their academic studies (and perhaps their post-university life) without the most basic information literacy skills. It's a depressing thought if one dwells on it for long enough. On the positive side, only one student used Wikipedia...which leads me to the next cosmic event...

Last week I was doing my periodic 'catch up' on some recent research literature. This normally entails scanning my RSS feeds for recently published papers in the journals and flicking through the pages of the recent issues of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). A paper published in JASIST at the tail end of 2009 caught my eye: 'How and Why Do College Students Use Wikipedia?' by Sook Lim which, compared to the hyper scientific paper titles such as 'A relation between h-index and impact factor in the power-law model' or 'Exploiting corpus-related ontologies for conceptualizing document corpora' (another interesting paper), sounds quite magazine-like. Lim investigated and analysed data on students' perceptions, uses of, and motivations for using Wikipedia in order to better understand student information seeking behaviour. She employed frameworks from social cognitive theory and 'uses and gratification' literature. Her findings are too detailed to summarise here. Suffice to say, Lim found many students to use Wikipedia for academic purposes, but not in their academic work; rather, students used Wikipedia to check facts and figures quickly, or to glean quick background information so that they could better direct their studying. In fact, although students found Wikipedia to be useful for fact checking, etc., their perceptions of its information quality were not high at all. Students knew it to be a suspect source and were sceptical when using it.

After the A&E experience of marking the LBSIS1036 submissions, Lim's results were fantastic news and my spirits were lifted immediately. Students are more discerning than we give them credit for, I thought to myself. Fantastic! 'Information Armageddon' doesn't await Generation Y after all. Imagine my disappointment the following morning when I boarded a train to Liverpool Central to find myself seated next to four students. It was here that I would experience my third cosmic event. Gazing out the train window as the sun was rising over Bootle docks and the majesty of its containerisation, I couldn't help but listen to the students as they were discussing an assignment which they had all completed and were on their journey to submit. The discussion followed the usual format, e.g. "What did you write in your essay?" "How did you structure yours?", etc. It then emerged that all four of them had used Wikipedia as the principal source for their essay and that they simply copied and pasted passages verbatim. In fact, one student remarked, "The lecturer might get suspicious if you copy it directly, so all I do is change the order of any bullet points and paragraphs. I change some of the words used too". (!!!!!!!!!!)

My hope would be that these students get caught cheating because, even without using Turnitin, catching students cheating with sources such as Wikipedia is easy peasy. But a bigger question is whether information literacy instruction is a futile pursuit? Will instant gratification always prevail?

Image: Polaroidmemories (Flickr), CreativeCommons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Here cometh the pay wall: the countdown begins...

2010-03-26T14:27:00.004Z

So the Times Online will be charging for news content from June 2010... News International is just one of several news organisations (some big, e.g. NY Times, ABC, etc.) which have plans to erect pay walls and develop subscription based models imminently. Love him or loathe him (well, most people loathe him), you have to respect Rupert Murdoch's pit-bull instincts in leading a growing number of content providers to erect – or at least consider the erection – of pay walls. Murdoch knows that most of the content industry wants to see the proliferation of pay walls. In fact, pay walls are their only saviour. Certain death awaits them otherwise. James Harding of The Times said as much in an interview today: "It [charging for Times Online access] is less of a risk than continuing to do what we are currently doing".

The trouble is that few yet have the gumption to do it. Murdoch, I suspect, is one of several who thinks that once there is a critical mass of high profile content providers implementing pay walls then there will be deluge of others. And I think he is probably correct in this assumption. After all, subscription can actually work. The FT and Wall Street Journal have successfully had subscription models for years (although they admittedly provide an indispensible service to readers in the financial and business sectors). An additional benefit of pay wall proliferation will be the simultaneous decline of news aggregators (which Murdoch has been particularly vexed about recently) and 'citizen journalists', both of which have contributed to the ineffectiveness of advertising as a business model for online newspapers. The truth is that the future of good journalism depends on the success of these subscription-based business models; but the success of this also has implications for other content providers or Internet services experiencing similar problems, social networking services being a prime example.

If you take the time to peruse the page created by BBC News to collect user comments on this story, a depressingly long slew of comments can be found in which it becomes clear that most users (not all, it should be noted) have a huge difficulty with subscription models or simply do not understand what the business problem is. And largely this is down to the fact that most ordinary people think:

That content providers of all types, not just newspapers, are a bunch of rip-off merchants who are dissatisfied with their lot in the digital sphere;
That content providers generate abnormal profits from advertising revenue and that their businesses are based on robust business models, and
That free content, aggregation and 'citizen journalists' fulfil their news or content needs admirably and that high quality journalism is therefore superfluous.

My opinion, for what it is worth, is that most users simply don't recognise that businesses require business models, nor do they realise that many of the services they use on the web day in and day out are either unprofitable or are losing large amounts of money. It's always good to receive something for free; however, someone somewhere has to pay. This reality is inescapable. Traditionally this has been advertisers, partly because Google have been good at it; but what do you do when advertising doesn't bring home the bacon??? Many users dismiss the implementation of pay walls by telling us that they will get their news from a free sources or blogs. The reliance on free or citizen journalism is disappointing, but more than that it is dangerous for democracy. Such sources simply do not have the resources (financial or intellectual) to deliver high quality, reliable news. They don't have the training, or the new connections, or the international correspondents, or the access to the information required, nor do they operate within recognised ethical boundaries or present facts and stories objectively and with appropriate sources or evidence. Often they are motivated more by communicating with like minded readers, perpetuating gossip or untruths.

The real truth of course is that newspapers are losing tremendous amounts of money. It seems to be unfashionable to say it – even the great but struggling Guardian chokes on these words – but free can no longer continue. Newspapers across the world have restructured and reinvented themselves to cope with the digital world. But there is only so much rearranging of the Titantic's deck chairs that can occur. The bottom line is that advertising as a business model isn't a business model. (See this, this and this for previous musings on this blog). Facebook is set to be 'cash flow positive' for the first time this financial year. No-one knows how much profit it will generate, although economic analysts suspect it will be small. What does this say about the viability of advertising as a revenue stream when a service with over 500 million users can barely cover costs? But what are Facebook to do? Chris Taylor conducted an unscientific survey with some International MBA students last week, all of whom reported positively on their continued use of Facebook to connect with family and friends at home and within Liverpool Business School. The question was: Would you be willing to pay £3 per annum to access Facebook? The response was unanimous: 'No'.

Sigh.

How much software is there in Liverpool and is it enough to keep me interested

2010-03-25T12:51:00.006Z

I am worrying about 'S' which I'll define here as the quantity of commercial software source code under maintenance and 'delta S' how this figure is changing. And by implication what we should be doing to make 'S' and 'delta-S' bigger. I'd rather the government worried about this rather than subsidising super fast YouTube to cottage dwellers.

In particular I am thinking about my home market in Liverpool where I am hoping to continue to carve some kind of career in my day job. If there is not enough 'S' to keep me going for another 25 years I'm going to get bored, poor or a job at McDonalds.

'S' maintenance is only a relatively minor destination for our business information systems students (still the students with the highest exit salary in the business school I am told please send yourself and your children BIS Course), but it is important to me.

Back in the day job we are working on developing LabCom a business to business tracking system for chemical samples and their results. One of the things that appeals to my mind is the fact that it is building a machine that is making things happen. I like to see how many samples are processed on it a year. Sad I know. We are delivering various new modules that will hopefully allow it all to grow. However thus far the project is not really big enough to fund the level of technical development and architecture expertise we would like to deploy, not enough 'S' to on its own maintain and fund high level development capabilities. The alternative for software developers such as my team is to engage in shorter term development consultancy forays, but for these to be of sustained technical interest they have probably got to add up to 100K or more and alas we have not worked out how to regularly corner such jobs.

With few software companies in Liverpool I wonder how this translates into the bigger picture and whether we can measure it.

There is definitely some 'S' in Liverpool, I did some work a couple of years back looking at software architecture with my friends at New Mind who are a national leader in destination management services and have a big crunching bit of software behind it. Angel Solutions are another company with a national footprint, this time in the education sector, backed by source code controlled in Liverpool. I have come across only two or three others over the years although no doubt there are some hiding. For someone trying to make a career out of having the skills to understand and develop big software this lack of available candidates in Liverpool might be a bit of a problem. A bit like getting an advanced mountaineering certificate in Norfolk ( see news Buscuit).

With this in mind I wondered is there more or less 'S' under management in Liverpool than elsewhere. Is this really the Norfolk of mountaineering.

How can we know. There are some publicly available records, we could dig up finances of software companies and similar, although most of these companies (including my own) are principally guns for hire engaging in consultancy and development services.

Liverpool's Software/New Media industry has a number of great companies such as Liverpool Business School Graduate led Mando Group and Trinity Mirror owned Ripple Effect and the only big player Strategic System Solutions. However as I understand it these are service delivery and consultancy companies not software product development companies they make their money through expertese, they contain a relatively low proportion of 'S'. Probably the largest block of software under management will be in the IT departments no doubt they have a bit of 'S'.

So how could we weigh this here in Liverpool or elsewhere. How much software is there. Lots of small companies such as my own have part of their income from owned source code IP 'S'. There are the few larger ones. So we could try to get a list and determine what proportion of income is generated from these outfits based on public records and a little inside knowledge. We could perhaps measure the number of software developers deployed or the traditional measure of SLOC (Source Lines Of Code). I've in the past looked at variants on Mark II Function Point Analysis you can find out a little about this on the United Kingdom Software Metrics Association website . In my commercial world I’m interested in estimating cost hence toying with these methods while we ponder what we can get away with charging and is it more than the our estimated (guessed) cost. In this regional context I’m interested in whether we can measure how much value there is lurking to give a figure for 'S'.

Imagine we did measure that the quantity of commercial code under management in Liverpool was I’ll call it 'Liver-S', I then want to know how this compares to Manchester's 'Manc-S' (I suspect unfavourably) and perhaps more importantly from a career and commercial point of view how it compares to last year. Is 'Liver-S' getting bigger (what is 'delta Liver-S').
The importance of 'S' and 'delta S' is about whether we are maintaining enough work to maintain or indeed develop a capacity to ‘do big software’ in the local economy. Without which to be honest I’m going to get bored.

Any masters/mba students stuck for a bit of an assignment or even better funding bodies wanting to help me answer this question please drop me a line.

If there is not enough 'Liver-S' in the future at least I'll be able to sit at home with my super fast broadband.

The 'real' iPad

2010-02-02T19:13:00.004Z

I am now utterly exhausted with all the discussion and comment surrounding the new Apple iPad. Phew! The amusing video below therefore offers a welcome break from the hyperbole.

The video, publicised by BoingBoing, features one of Liverpool's funniest chaps: Peter Serafinowicz. Serafinowicz has managed to release an iPad parody (days after its launch by Apple) in order to plug the release of his latest DVD. He's quick off the mark. Serafinowicz has often included Apple parodies in his shows, such as the iToilet and the MacTini. This follows a similar format and is similarly amusing. Enjoy!

The iPad - watch more funny videos

Renaissance of thesaurus-enhanced information retrieval?

2010-01-26T22:21:00.008Z

As my students in BSNIM3034 Content Management have been learning recently, semantics play such a huge role in the level of recall and precision capable of being achieved in an information retrieval system. Put simply, computers are great at interpreting syntax but are far too dumb to understand semantics or the intricacies of human language. This has historically been – and currently remains – the trump card of metadata proponents, and it is something the Semantic Web is attempting to resolve with its use of structured data too. The creation of metadata involves a human; a cataloguer who performs a 'conceptual analysis' of the information object in question to determine its 'aboutness'. They then translate this into the concepts prescribed in a controlled vocabulary or encoding scheme (e.g. taxonomy, thesaurus, etc.) and create other forms of descriptive and administrative metadata. All this improves recall and precision (e.g. conceptually similar items are retrieved and conceptually dissimilar items are suppressed).

As good as they are these days, retrieval systems based on automatic indexing (i.e. most web search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.) suffer from the 'syntax problem'. They provide what appears to be high recall coupled with poor precision. This is the nature of search the engine beast. Conceptually similar items are ignored because such systems are unable to tell that 'Haematobia irritans' is a synonym of 'horn flies' or that 'java' is a term fraught with homonymy (e.g. 'java' the programming language, 'java' the island within the Indonesian archipelago and 'java' the coffee, and so forth). All of the aforementioned contributes to arguably the biggest problem for user searching: query formulation. Search engines suffer from the added lack of any structured browsing of, say, resource subjects, titles, etc. to assist users in query formulation.

This blog has discussed query formulation in the search process at various times (see this for example). The selection of search terms for query formulation remains one of the most difficult stages in users' information retrieval process. The huge body of research relating to information seeking behaviour, information retrieval, relevance feedback, and human-computer interaction attests to this. One of the techniques used to assist users in query formulation is thesaurus assisted searching and/or query expansion. Such techniques are not particularly new and are often used in search systems successfully (see Ali Shiri's JASIST paper from 2006).

Last week, however, Google announced adjustments to their search service. This adjustment is particularly significant because it is an attempt to control for synonyms. Their approach is based on 'contextual language analysis' rather than the use of information retrieval thesauri. The blog reads:

"Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts [...] Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality."

Firstly, this is certainly positive news. Synonyms – as noted above – are a well known phenomenon which has blighted the effectiveness of automatic indexing in retrieval. But on the negative side – and not to belittle Google's efforts as they are dealing with unstructured data - Google are only dealing with single words. 'Song lyrics' and 'song words', or 'homocide' and 'murder' (examples provided from Google on their blog posting) They are dealing with words in a Roget's Thesaurus sense, rather than compound terms in an information retrieval thesaurus sense – and it is the latter which will ultimately be more useful in improving recall and precision. This is, after all, why information retrieval thesauri have historically been used in searching.

More interesting will be Google's exploration of homonymous terms. Homonyms are more complex that synonyms and are, perhaps for the foreseeable future, an intractable problem?

Death of the book salesman...

2010-01-15T11:18:00.006Z

Shopping in Glasgow prior to Christmas was a sad time. Borders, which occupied what is reputed to be the most expensive retail space in Glasgow (the old Royal Bank of Scotland building), announced that it was in administration and was flogging all stock in a gargantuan clearance sale. Borders had become an institution since it opened on Buchannan Street in 1997 (I think) and I'm sure branches in other cities were similarly iconic and located at city centre hot-spots, the London Oxford Street branch being another prime example. It was a great place to meet friends before heading out for dinner or drinks; perusing the amazing magazine or newspaper selection, or browsing the books or music. Of course, I stopped buying books there years ago because the genre classification they used made it impossible to find anything; but it nevertheless occupied a special place in my heart...

The official line is that Borders fell victim to the current economic climate, although it was a complicated concatenation of economic circumstances, including aggressive competition from online retailers and particularly supermarkets (those supermarkets again – a £3 copy of the latest Jordan autobiography anyone?), a sales downturn and, finally, a lack of credit from suppliers. Waterstone's remains the only national bookseller but today was responsible for a decline in the share price of HMV as their Chief Executive tries to administer 'bookshop CPR' (i.e. let's make our stores more cosy). Can we expect the closure of it too in the foreseeable future? That would be extremely depressing...

Of course it's all depressing news; but one can't help thinking that the demise of super-selling bookshops was a quagmire of their own making. The Net Book Agreement (NBA) – the 100 year long (almost) price fixing of books which collapsed in 1995 – was precipitated by Waterstone's in the first place. And it was precisely the collapse of the NBA which enticed Borders to the UK and enabled Amazon to establish UK operations. Both retailers would not have been able to operate with the NBA still in operation (remember the big Amazon book discounts in the late 1990s?). I suppose none of the book retailers anticipated the level of competitive aggression they had unleashed, particularly from supermarkets. Although I think some naivety played a part...

Many years ago I recall enjoying a talk delivered by the Deputy Chairman of John Smith & Son, Willie Anderson. Despite being the oldest bookseller in the English speaking world, John Smith moved off the high street many years ago. You are now most likely to encounter them as the university campus bookseller. During his talk Willie made an interesting point about the lack of business sense in the book selling industry; that the NBA had made all book sellers blind to conventional business practice or simple economic principles such as the laws of supply and demand. Said Willie (as best as I can remember! It was well over 10 years ago!):

"Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was anticipated to be a best seller and an extremely popular title. We [John Smith & Son] had large pre-orders from customers. Yet, virtually all other booksellers were slashing prices and offering ridiculous pre-order discounts on an item which commanded a high price. At John Smith we didn't offer any discounts and we sold every copy at full price, precisely because demand was high. This is normal business practice, but most book retailers appear to be oblivious to this. Book retailers have a lot to learn about competition because they have been protected from it for so long. The industry needs to learn quickly otherwise it will suffer economic difficulties in the future".

What happens now then? There is certainly money to be made in book selling, particularly with the decline of 'good' stockists. There are more books bought now than at any time in history. Perhaps the time is ripe for a renaissance in the classic independent bookshop, of which Reid of Liverpool is archetypal? Supermarkets do not - I think - occupy the same business space as such book sellers and thus allowing the independent retailer to thrive. There wouldn't be any Costa or Starbucks, nor would it occupy a prime retail site, but I think we'd be all the better for it.

(Photo: Laura-Elizabeth, Flickr, Creative Commons)

Getting into technical debt in a recession?

2009-11-17T10:26:00.003Z

I like this succinct quote from TalkTalk CIO David Cooper about the IT systems in newly acquired Tiscali.

"In addition, Tiscali faced some IT issues in the past and worked pragmatically to fix them, resulting in some discontinuities between systems – we are repairing this now," www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2252848/ringing-changes-talktalk-4893004

There are, no doubt, times to go for the cheapest, quickest most 'pragmatic' solution to getting systems to mesh together. But in getting to a solution for least cost there can be an accumulation of 'Technical Debt'. I know that one of my clients in my day job, keeps a measure of technical debt being accumulated in development projects. But it is difficult to persuade an organisation to contemplate such debt, let alone put it on the balance sheet.

It's never easy either to argue for spending money on technical debt when you can have new shiny functionality baubles. What we find we do at Village Software when working on clients projects is try to improve things as we go along. Most clients would not be happy if we suggested they spent 10’s of thousands refactoring a system with little or no functional gain. Hence I suspect we often do this on the cheap out of a possibly misplaced or at least poorly negotiated sense of professionalism. We have recently spent a five figure sum refactoring our Lab Solution to improve it under the hood, I've got to say this hurts and we are now on a functionality campaign.

I wonder what the effect of the current recession is on technical debt. In principle resources to deal with it are cheaper than in a boom time. However the need to gain the cost reducing, innovation gaining benefits of Business Information Systems at lower investments will surely lead to an increase in technical debt across the economy. Perhaps the UK is accumulating billions of technical debt in the public and private sector to match the vast national debt in the public sector and the balance sheet retrenchments in the private sector.

The term 'Technical Debt' by the way was coined by Ward Cunningham as a useful allegory. One of the great thinkers in current software development Martin Fowler describes it on his Wiki martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html. He explains that getting things done, in a way TalkTalk's David Cooper describes generously as pragmatically, is like borrowing money, you have to start paying interest, eventually you have to pay it back along with the principal. Ward Cunningham has a neat little 4 point plan referring to technical debt in software development. (For those not familiar with the term, refactoring is the practice of improving software code quality without adding functionality). Cunningham describes technical debt on his Wiki (all these guys have wikis) www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ComplexityAsDebt :-

Skipping design is like borrowing money.

Refactoring is like repaying principal.

Slower development due to complexity is like paying interest.

When the whole project caves in under the mess, is that like when the big guys come round and slam your hands in the car door for not paying up?

Others describe it by the allegory of lactic acid building up on your muscles during a run. In the wider world of Commercial and Government ICT we can expect a build up of such debt. For businesses without a strategic plan for ICT, the resources to deliver a plan or whose plan is to accumulate technical debt there is going to be a backlog. Alas 'Technical Debt' will not be appearing on balance sheets soon if indeed there were a way to measure it. I would be baffled if a student asked how to go about measuring technical debt in his company.

I have a feeling that the Information Systems people, like me, will somehow get the blame for letting such debt accumulate.

Life can be unfair, but it is indoor work no heavy lifting.

An interesting article about search engines...again...

2009-11-13T09:21:00.002Z

Victor Keegan (Guardian Technology journalist) published an interesting column yesterday on the current state of search engines. The column entitled, "Why I am searching beyond Google", is an interesting discussion which picks up on something that has been discussed a lot on this blog: the fact that Google really isn't that good any more. There are dozens of search engines out there which offer the user greater functionality and/or search data which Google ignores or can't be bothered indexing. Yahoo! and Bing are mentioned by Keegan, but leapfish, monitter and duckduckgo are also discussed.

Keegan also comments on the destructive monopoly that Google has within search:

"If you were to do a blind tasting of Google with Yahoo, Bing or others, you would be pushed to tell them apart. Google's power is no longer as a good search engine but as a brand and an increasingly pervasive one. Google hasn't been my default search for ages but I am irresistibly drawn to it because it is embedded on virtually every page I go to and, as a big user of other Google services (documents, videos, Reader, maps), I don't navigate to Google search, it navigates to me."

This is where Google's dominance is starting to become a problem. Competition is no longer fair. There are now several major search engines which are, in many ways, better than Google; yet, this is not reflected in their market share, partly because the search market is now so skewed in Google's favour. As Keegan notes, Google comes to him, not the other way round.

In a concurrent development, WolframAlpha is to be incorporated into Bing to augment Bing's results in areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics. Will we see Google incorporate structured data from Google Squared into their universal search soon?

I realise that this is yet another blog posting about either, a) Google, or, b) search engines. I promise this is the last, for at least, erm, 2 months. In my defence, I am simply highlighting an interesting article rather than making a bona fide blog posting!

Blackboard on the shopping list: do Google need reining in?

2009-10-22T09:33:00.002+01:00

Alex Spiers (Learning Innovation & Development, LJMU) alerted me via Twitter to rumours in the 'Internet playground' that Google is considering branching out into educational software. According to the article spreading the rumour, Google plans to fulfil its recent pledge to acquire one small company per month by purchasing Blackboard.

The area of educational software is not completely alien to Google. The Google Apps Education Edition (providing email, collaboration widgets, etc.) has been around for a while now (I think) and - as the article insinuates - moving deeper into educational software seems a natural progression and provides Google with clear access to a key demographic. This is all conjecture of course; but if Google acquired Blackboard I think I would suffer a schizophrenic episode. A part of me would think, "Great - Google will make Blackboard less clunky, offer more functionality and more flexiblity". But the other part (which is slightly bigger, I think) would feel extremely uncomfortable that Google is yet again moving into new areas, probably with the intention of dominating that area.

We forget how huge and pervasive Google is today. Google is everywhere and now reaches far beyond its dominant position in search into virtually every significant area of web and software development. If Google were Microsoft the US Government and the EU would be all over Google like a rash for pushing the boundaries of antitrust legislation and competition laws. This situation takes on a rather sinister tone when you consider the situation in HE if Blackboard becomes a Google subsidiary. Edge Hill University is one of several institutions which has elected to ditch fully integrated institutional email applications (e.g. MS Outlook, Thunderbird) in favour of Google Mail. Having a VLE maintained by Google therefore sets the alarm bells ringing. The key technological interactions for a 21st century student are as follows: email, web, VLE, library. Picture it - a student existence which would be entirely dependent upon one company and the directed advertising that goes with it: Google Mail, web (and their first port of call is likely to be Google, of course), GoogleBoard (the name of Blackboard if they decided to re-brand it!) and a massive digital library which Google is attempting to create and which would essentially create a de facto digital library monopoly.

I'm probably getting ahead of myself. The acquisition of Blackboard probably won't happen, and the digital library has encountered plenty of opposition, not least from Angela Merkel; but it does get me thinking that Google finally needs reining in. Even before this news broke I was starting to think that Google was turning into a Sesame Street-style Cookie Monster, devouring everything in sight. Their ubiquity can't possibly be healthy anymore, can it? Or am I being completely paranoid?

The Kindle according to Cellan-Jones

2009-10-19T11:58:00.003+01:00

The world in which Rory Cellan-Jones exists is an interesting place. It's one which often results in a good, hard slap to the face. He can always be relied upon for some cynicism and negativity (or realism?) in his analysis of new technologies and tech related businesses. (See the last posting about Google Wave, for example.) This can be unexpected, often because he sees through the hype or aesthetics of many technologies and evaluates stuff based squarely on utilitarian principles. His overview of the Kindle is no exception to this rule:

"The Kindle looks to me like an attractive but expensive niche product, giving a few techie bibliophiles the chance to take more books on holiday without incurring excess baggage charges. But will it force thousands of bookshops to close and transform the economics of struggling newspapers? Don't bet on it."

The thing is, Cellan-Jones often talks a lot of sense. To be sure, the Kindle looks like an extremely smart piece of kit, but when Cellan-Jones stacks up the realities of the Kindle one wonders whether it'll be the game changer everyone is expecting it to be.

The focus for the Kindle seems to be on the best seller lists and the broad sheets. An area which appears to have eluded adequate exposition by all the tech commentators is the use of this new generation of e-book readers to deliver text books, learning materials, etc. This was always considered an important area for the early e-book readers. Why carry lots of heavy text books around when you could have them all on your Kindle or Sony Reader Touch, and be in a position to browse and search the content therein more effectively? Or, is this an extravagant use of E-Ink? E-Ink is required for lengthy reading sessions (i.e. novel) rather than dipping in and out of text books to complete academic tasks, something for which a netbook or mobile device might be better. So what happens to the future of e-book readers in academia?

Wave a washout?

2009-10-09T12:47:00.004+01:00

This is just a brief posting to flag up a review of Google Wave on the BBC dot.life blog.

Google unveiled Wave at their Google I/O conference in late May 2009. The Wave development team presented a lengthy demonstration of what it can do and – given that it was probably a well rehearsed presentation and demo – Wave looked pretty impressive. It might be a little bit boring of me, but I was particularly impressed by the context sensitive spell checker ("Icland is an icland" – amazing!). Those of you that missed that demonstration can check it out in the video below. And try not to get annoyed at the sycophantic applause of their fellow Google developers...

Since then Wave has been hyped up by the technology press and even made mainstream news headlines at the BBC, Channel 4 News, etc. when it went on limited (invitation only) release last week. Dot.life has reviewed Wave and the verdict was not particularly positive. Surprisingly they (Rory Cellan-Jones, Stephen Fry, Bill Thompson and others) found it pretty difficult to use and pretty chaotic. I'm now anxious to try it out myself because I was convinced that it would be pretty amazing. Their review is funny and worth reading in full; but the main issues were noted as follows:

"Well, I'm not entirely sure that our attempt to use Google Wave to review Google Wave has been a stunning success. But I've learned a few lessons.

First of all, if you're using it to work together on a single document, then a strong leader (backed by a decent sub-editor, adds Fildes) has to take charge of the Wave, otherwise chaos ensues. And that's me - so like it or lump it, fellow Wavers.

Second, we saw a lot of bugs that still need fixing, and no very clear guide as to how to do so. For instance, there is an "upload files" option which will be vital for people wanting to work on a presentation or similar large document, but the button is greyed out and doesn't seem to work.

Third, if Wave is really going to revolutionise the way we communicate, it's going to have to be integrated with other tools like e-mail and social networks. I'd like to tell my fellow Wavers that we are nearly done and ready to roll with this review - but they're not online in Wave right now, so they can't hear me.

And finally, if such a determined - and organised - clutch of geeks and hacks struggle to turn their ripples and wavelets into one impressive giant roller, this revolution is going to struggle to capture the imagination of the masses."

My biggest concern about Wave was the important matter of critical mass, and this is something the dot.life review hints at too. A tool like Wave is only ever going to take off if large numbers of people buy into it; if your organisation suddenly dumps all existing communication and collaboration tools in favour of Wave. It's difficult to see that happening any time soon...

AJAX content made discoverable...soon

2009-10-08T09:48:00.003+01:00

I follow the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. It can be an interesting read at times, but on other occasions it provides humdrum information on how best to optimise a website, or answers questions which most of us know the answers to already (e.g. recently we had, 'Does page metadata influence Google page rankings?'). However, the latest posting is one of the exceptions. Google have just announced that they are proposing a new standard to make AJAX-based websites indexable and, by extension, discoverable to users. Good ho!

The advent of Web 2.0 has brought about a huge increase in interactive websites and dynamic page content, much of which has been delivered using AJAX ('Asynchronous JavaScript and XML', not a popular household cleaner!). AJAX is great and furnished me with my iGoogle page years ago; but increasingly websites use it to deliver page content which might otherwise be delivered using static web pages in XHTML. This presents a big problem for search engines because AJAX is currently un-indexable (if this is a word!) and a lot of content is therefore invisible to all search engines. Indeed, the latest web design mantra has been "don't publish in AJAX if you want your website to be visible". (There are also accessibility and usability issues, but these are an aside for this posting...)

The Webmaster Blog summarises:

"While AJAX-based websites are popular with users, search engines traditionally are not able to access any of the content on them. The last time we checked, almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines."

Google's proposal involves shifting the responsibility of indexing the website to the administrator/webmaster of the website, whose responsibility it would be to set up a headless browser on the web server. (A headless browser is essentially a browser without a user interface; a piece of software that can access web documents but does not deliver them to human users). The headless browser would then be used to programmatically access the AJAX website on the server and provide an HTML 'snap shot' to search engines when they request it - which is a clever idea. The crux of Google's proposal is a suite of URL protocols. These would control when the search engine knows to request the headless browser information (i.e. HTML snapshot) and which URL to reveal to human users.

It's good that Google are taking the initiative; my only concern is that they start trying to re-write standards, as they have a little with RDFa. Their slides are below - enjoy!

Yahoo! is alive and kicking!

2009-09-23T08:21:00.003+01:00

In a recent posting I discussed the partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft and wondered whether this might bring an end to Yahoo!'s innovate information retrieval work. Yesterday the Official Yahoo! Search Blog announced big changes to Yahoo! Search. Many of the these changes have been discussed in previous postings here (e.g. Search Assist, Search Pad, Search Monkey, etc.); however, Yahoo! have updated their search and results interface to make better use of these tools. As they state:

"[These changes] deliver a dynamic, compelling, and integrated experience that better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web."

To us it means better integration of user query formation tools, better use of structured data on the Web (e.g. RDF data, metadata, etc.) to provide improved results and results browsing, and improved filtering tools, something which is nicely explained in their grand tour. According to their blog though, better integration of these innovations involved a serious overhaul of the Yahoo! Search technical architecture to make it run faster.

"Now, here's the best part: Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch. This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process."

I sound like a sales officer for Yahoo!, but these improvements are really very good indeed and have to be experienced first hand. It's good to see that the intellectual capital of Yahoo! has not disappeared, and fingers-crossed it never will. True - these updates were probably already in the pipeline months before the partnership with Microsoft; but it at least demonstrates to Microsoft why it still has the upper hand in Web search.

Trough of disillusionment for microblogging and social software?

2009-08-13T13:33:00.009+01:00

The IT research firm Gartner has recently published another of its technology reports for 2009: Gartner's Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009. This report is another in a long line of similar Gartner reports which do exactly what they say on the tin. That is, they provide a technology 'hype cycle' for 2009! Did you see that coming?! The technology hype cycle was a topic that Johnny Read recently discussed at an ISG research reading group, so I thought it was worth commenting on.

According to Gartner - who I believe introduced the concept of the technology hype cycle - the expectations of new or emerging technology grows far more quickly that the technology itself. This is obviously problematic since user expectations get inflated only to be deflated later as the true value of the technology slowly becomes recognised. This true value is normally reached when the technology experiences mainstream use (i.e. plateau of productivity). The figure below illustrates the basic principles behind the hype cycle model.

The latest Gartner hype cycle (below) is interesting - and interesting is really as far as you can go with this because it's unclear how the hype cycles are compiled and whether they can be used for forecasting or as a true indicator of technology trends. Nevertheless, according to the hype cycle 2009, microblogging and social networking are on the decent into the trough of disillusionment.

From a purely personal view this is indeed good news as it might mean I don't have to read about Twitter in virtually every technology newspaper, blog and website for much longer, or be exposed to a woeful interview of the Twitter CEO on Newsnight. But I suppose it is easy to anticipate the plateau of productivity for these technologies. Social software has been around for a while now, and my own experiences would suggest that many people are starting to withdraw from it; the novelty has worn off. And remember, it's not just users that perpetuate the hype cycle, those wishing to harness the social graph for directed advertising, marketing, etc. are probably sliding down the trough of disillisionment too as the promise of a captive audience has not been financially fulfilled.

It's worth perusing the Gartner report itself - interesting. The above summary hype cycle figure doesn't seem to be available at the report, so I've linked to the version available at the BBC dot.life blog which also discusses the report.

Extending the FOAF vocabulary for junkets, personal travel and map generation

2009-08-04T14:50:00.007+01:00

As we know, FOAF provides a good way of exposing machine-readable data on people, their activities and interests, and the nature of their relationships with other people, groups or things. FOAF allows us to model social networks much in the same way as a social networking service might (e.g. Facebook). The big difference being that with FOAF the resultant social graph is exposed to the Semantic Web in a distributed way for machine processing (and all the goodness that this might entail…); not held in proprietary databases.

FOAF data has generally always been augmented with other RDF vocabularies. Nothing strange in this; this was anticipated, and reusing and remixing vocabularies and RDF data is a key component of the Semantic Web. My FOAF profile, for example, uses numerous additional vocabularies for enrichment, including Dublin Core, the Music Ontology, and the Contact, Relationship and Basic Geo vocabularies. The latter vocabulary (Basic Geo) provides the hook for this blog posting.

The need to provide geographical coordinates and related data in RDF was recognised early in the life of the Semantic Web, and the Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary website lists obvious applications for such data. Although including geographical data within FOAF profiles presents an obvious use (e.g. using Basic Geo to provide the latitude and longitude of, say, your office location), few people do it because few applications actually do anything with it. That was until a couple of years ago when Richard Cyganiak (DERI, National University of Ireland) developed an experimental FOAF widget (FOAF – Where Am I?) to determine geographical coordinates using the Google Maps API and then to spit it out in FOAF RDF/XML for inclusion in a FOAF profile. In his words, "there's no more excuses for [not including coordinates]". With coordinates included, FOAF profiles could be mapped using Alexandre Passant's FOAFMap.net widget (also from DERI), which was developed around the same time and extracts geographical data embedded within FOAF profiles and then maps it using Google Maps. Despite the presence of these useful widgets, FOAF profiles rarely contain location data because, let's face it, are we that interested in a precise geographical location of an office?!

More interesting – and perhaps more useful – is to model personal travel within a FOAF profile. This is consistent with the recent emergence (within the past year or so) of 'smart travel' services on the web, the most notable of which is probably Dopplr. Dopplr essentially allows users to create, share and map details of future journeys and travel itineraries with friends, colleagues, business contacts, etc. so that overlaps can be discovered in journey patterns and important meetings arranged between busy persons. It is also consistent with the personal homepages of academics and researchers. For example, Ivan Herman's (W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead) website is one of many which include a section about upcoming trips. There are others too. From personal experience I can confirm that many an international research relationship has been struck by knowing who is going to be at the conference you are attending next week! People also like to record where they have been and why, and the 'Cities I've Visited' Facebook application provides yet another example of wanting to associate travel with a personal profile, albeit within Facebook.

Of course, Dopplr and Facebook applications are all well and good; but we want to expose these journeys and travel itineraries in a distributed and machine processable way - and FOAF profiles are the obvious place to do it. It is possible to use the RDF Calendar vocabulary to model some travel, but it's a little itchy and can't really tell us the purpose of a journey. Other travel ontologies exist, but they are for 'serious' travel applications and too heavy weight for a simple FOAF profile. It therefore occurred to me that there is a need for a light weight RDF travel vocabulary, ideally for use with FOAF, which can better leverage the power of existing vocabularies such as Basic Geo and RDF Calendar. I documented my original thoughts about this on my personal blog, which I use of more technical musings. Enriching a FOAF profile with such data would not only expose it to the Semantic Web and enrich social graphs, but make applications (similar to those described above) possible in an open way.

To this end I have started authoring the Travelogue RDF Vocabulary (TRAVOC). It's a pretty rough and ready approach (c'mon, 3 -4 hours!) and is really just for experimental purposes; but I have published what I have so far. A formal RDF Schema is also available. Most properties entail being a foaf:Person and I have provided brief examples on my blog.

As noted, TRAVOC has been sewn together in a short order. It would therefore benefit from some further consideration, refinements and (maybe) expansion. Perhaps there's a research proposal in it? Thoughts anyone? In particular, I would be interested know if any of the TRAVOC properties overlap with existing vocabularies which I haven't been able to find. If I have time – and if and when I am satisfied with the final vocabulary - I may acquire the necessary PURLs.

Is it R.I.P. for Yahoo! as we know it?

2009-07-29T18:01:00.004+01:00

And so Microsoft and Yahoo! finally agree terms of a partnership which will change the face of the web search market. Historically – and let's face it, this story has been ongoing since January 2008! – Microsoft always wanted to take over Yahoo!; but on reflection both parties probably felt that forging a partnership was most likely to give them success against the market leader. So this has to be good news, no?

Well, it'll do some good to have the dominance of Google properly challenged by the next two biggest fish - and Google will probably be concerned. But their partnership entails that Yahoo! Search be powered by Bing and, in return, Yahoo! will become the sales force for both companies' premium search advertising. We've noted recently that Bing is good and was an admirable adversary for Yahoo!, but will a Yahoo! front-end powered by a Bing back-end mean an end to some of Yahoo!'s excellent retrieval tools (often documented on this blog, see this, this, this and this, for example) and, more importantly, an end to their innovative research strategies to better harness the power of structured data on the web? Is the innovative SearchMonkey Open Search Platform to be jettisoned?

The precise details of the partnership are sketchy at the moment, but it would be tragic if this intellectual capital was to be lost or now neglected...

Broken business models again...

2009-07-16T12:18:00.003+01:00

In a tenuous link with several previous blog postings (this one and this one), the latest BBC dot.life posting by Cellan-Jones discusses the future of the music industry. It's an interesting summary of recent research on the music habits of the British public. Surprisingly, CDs remain by far the most popular music format, even amongst teenagers. This pleases me because – although I am a man that enjoys his eMusic downloads - I am also a chap that enjoys the CD, its artwork, its liner notes, its aesthetic qualities, etc.

Of course, the big finding that people have been latching onto is the large reduction in illegal file sharing. This is indeed good news; however, whilst many of these music fans will have switched to legal download services (e.g. iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, take your pick....), many have reverted to legal streaming services like Spotify. The trouble is, as Cellan-Jones points out, Spotify is another service lacking a robust business strategy. Advertising doesn't bring home the bacon and Spotify is relying on users upgrading to their pay-for premium service. Unfortunately, nobody is. Without this revenue stream Spotify is doomed in the longer term. Nothing new in this; Spotify simply joins the growing number of Web 2.0 services that are failing to monetise their innovations.

By coincidence Guardian columnist, Paul Carr, authored an article a few days ago entitled, 'I'm calling a 'time of death' for London's internet startup industry'. The article laments the failure of London based Web 2.0 companies to experience any modicum of successful or profitability. Many of his arguments have been applied elsewhere, but the London focus makes it compelling reading, particularly because Carr was around during the first dot.com boom and has personally witnessed the mysterious nature of revenue within new media. His book, 'Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore', says it all. Like Cellan-Jones, Carr also singles out Spotify, although professing to be "discreet with names". Says Carr:

"You see, the sad but true fact – and I've said this before, albeit in less aggressive terms – is that the London internet industry is increasingly, and terminally, screwed. I'll be discreet with names so as not to make things worse but since I've been back in town, I've met no fewer than three once-successful entrepreneurs who admit they're running out of money at a sickening rate (personally and professionally) with no prospect of raising more. I've seen two businesses close and one having its funding yanked suddenly because, basically, it was going nowhere fast. Everyone I speak to has the same story: investors aren't investing, revenues aren't coming, founders are being forced out – or leaving of their own accord – and no one seems to have the first idea what to do about it. Even Spotify, the current darling of London startups (which is actually from Sweden), might not be doing as well as it appears. The company says it's projecting profitability by the end of the year, with a senior staffer boasting about that fact to the geeks at the Juju event. Unfortunately, when one blogger challenged him to provide numbers to back it up, he was forced to admit that the profitability is less "projected" and more "hoped for". Meanwhile, rivals (and fellow London poster-children) Last.fm just saw all three of their founders depart the company leaving a huge hole at the top during a time of massive uncertainty. However you dress it up, that's not good."

No - it's not good; but when is the madness all going to end? Like many others, I keep on thinking the end is 'just round the corner', but it never comes. How many insane venture capitalists are left? Will it be a house of cards, and, if so, which card is going to be removed first? Perhaps a little schadenfreude is order of the day - shall we have a sweepstake?

Welcome to my (Search) Pad

2009-07-07T14:58:00.004+01:00

Search innovators at Yahoo! have today launched Search Pad. Search Pad integrates with the usual Yahoo! Search interface and allows users to take notes while conducting common information seeking tasks (e.g. researching a holiday, whether to buy that new piece of gadgetry, etc.). Search Pad can track the websites users are visiting and is invoked when it considers the user to be conducting a research task. On the Yahoo! Search Blog today:

"Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user visits. Search Pad turns on automatically when you're doing research, tracking sites to make document authoring a snap. You can then quickly edit and organize your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting."

Nice. From the website and Yahoo! blog (and this video), Search Pad is in many ways reminiscent of Listas from Microsoft Live Labs (and discussed on this blog before). It's possible to copy text, images and create lists for sharing with others, either via URL or via other services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious). Search Pad also has an easy to use menu driven interface. Whilst it was useful in some circumstances, Listas lacked a worthy application; however, Search Pad builds on Listas functionality and instead has incorporated an improved version of it within a traditional search interface to do something we often do when we are searching (i.e. take notes about a search task).

The only problem is that I can't get it to work!! I have tried conducting a variety of 'obvious' research tasks which I anticipated Search Pad would recognise, but the Search Pad console hasn't appeared. Perhaps the 'intelligent detection' isn't has intelligent as promised? I'll keep trying, but please let me know if anyone has better luck. Still, it demonstrates the state of permanent innovation at Yahoo! Search.

When Web 2.0 business models and accessibility collide with information services and e-learning...

2009-07-01T13:17:00.005+01:00

Rory Cellan-Jones has today posted his musings on the current state of Facebook at the BBC dot.life blog. His posting was inspired by an interview with Sheryl Sandberg (Chief Operating Officer) and was originally billed as 'Will Facebook ever make any money?'. Sandberg was recruited from Google last year to help Facebook turn a financial corner. According to her interview with Cellan-Jones, Facebook is still failing to break even, but her projections are that Facebook will start to turn a profit by the end of 2010. If true, this will be good news for Facebook. Not everyone believes this of course, including Cellan-Jones judging by his questions, his raised left eye brow and his prediction that tighter EU regulation will harm Facebook growth. Says Cellan-Jones:

"And [another] person I met at Facebook's London office symbolised the firm's determination to deal with its other challenge - regulation.

Richard Allan, a former Liberal Democrat MP and then director of European government affairs at Cisco, has been hired to lobby European regulators for Facebook.

With the EU mulling over tighter privacy rules for firms that share their users' data, and with continuing concern from politicians about issues like cyber-bullying and hate-speak on social networks, there will be plenty on Mr Allan's plate.

So, yes, Facebook suddenly looks like a mature business, poised for steady progress towards profitability and ready to engage in grown-up conversations about its place in society. Then again, so did MySpace a year ago, until it suddenly went out of fashion."

This is all by way of introduction, because a few weeks ago I attended the CILIP MmIT North West day conference on 'Emerging technologies in the library' at LJMU. A series of interesting speakers, including Nick Woolley, Russell Prue and Jane Secker, pondered the use of new technologies in e-learning, digital libraries and other information services. Of course, one of the recurring themes to emerge throughout the day was the innovative use of social networking tools in e-learning or digital library contexts. To be sure, there is some innovative work going on; but none of the speakers addressed two elephants in the room:

Service longevity, and;
Accessibility

For me these are the two biggest threats to social media use within universities.

The adoption of Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter (and the rest) within universities has been rapid. Many in the literature and at conferences evangelise about the adoption of these tools as if their use was now mandatory. Nick Woolley voiced sensible concerns over this position. An additional concern that I have – and one I had hoped to verbalise at some point during the proceedings – is whether it is appropriate for services (whether e-learning or digital libraries, or whatever) to be going to the effort of embedding these technologies within curricula or services when they are third party services over which we have little control and when their economic futures are so uncertain.

The magic word at the MmIT event was 'free'. "Make use of this tool – it's free and the kids love it!". Very few of the tools over which LISers and learning technologists get excited about actually have viable business models. Google lost almost $500 million on YouTube in the year up to April 2009 and is unable to turn it into a viable business. MySpace is struggling and slashing staff, Facebook's future remains uncertain, Twitter currently has no business model at all and is being propped up by venture capitalists while it contemplates desperate ways to create revenue, and so the list continues. Will any of these services still be here next year? Well published and straight talking advertising consultant, George Parker, has been pondering the state of social media advertising on his blog recently (warning – he is straight talking and profanities are order of the day!). He has insightful comments to make though on why most of these services are never going to make spectacular amounts of money from their current (failed?) model (i.e. advertising). According to Parker, advertising is just plain wrong. Niche markets where subscriptions are required will be the only way for these services to make decent money...

A more general concern relates to the usability and accessibility of social networking services. Very few of them, if any, actually come close to minimal W3C accessibility guidelines, or DDA and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001. Surely there are legal and ethical questions to be asked, particularly of universities? Embedding these third party services into curricula seems like a good idea but it's one which could potentially exclude students from the same learning experience as others. This is a concern I have had for a few years now, but I had thought it would, a) have been resolved by services voluntarily by now, and, b) institutions wishing to deploy them would have taken measures to resolve it (this might be not using them at all!). Obviously not...

There are many arguments for not engaging with Web 2.0 at university, and - where appropriate - many of these arguments were cogently made at the MmIT conference. But if adopting such technologies is considered to be imperative, should we not be making more of an effort to develop tools that replicate their functionality, thus allowing control over their longevity and accessibility? Attempts at this have hitherto been pooh-poohed on the grounds that interrupting habitual student behaviour (i.e. getting students to switch from, say, Facebook to an academic equivalent) was too onerous, or that replicating the social mass and collaborative appeal of international networking sites couldn't be done within academic environments. But have we really tried hard enough? Most have been half-baked efforts. It is also noteworthy that research conducted by Mike Thelwall and published in JASIST indicates that homophily continues within social networking websites. If this is true, then it is likely that getting students to make the switch to locally hosted equivalents of Facebook or MySpace is certainly possible, particularly as the majority of their network will comprise similar people within similar academic situations.

Perhaps there is more of a need for the wider adoption of social web markup languages, such as the User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to enable users to switch between disparate social networking services whilst simultaneously allowing the portability of social capital (or 'user labour') from one service to another? This would make the decision to adopt academic equivalents far more attractive. However, if this is the case, then more research needs to be undertaken to extend ULML (and other options) to make them fully interoperable with the breadth of services currently available.

I don't like putting a downer on all the innovative and excellent work that the LIS and e-learning communities are doing in this area; it's just that many seem to be oblivious to these threats and are content to carry on regardless. Nothing good ever comes from carrying on regardless, least of all that dreadful tune by the Beautiful South. Let's just talk about it a bit more and actually acknowledge these issues...

Read all about it: interesting contributions at ISKO-UK 2009

2009-06-26T15:45:00.017+01:00

I had the pleasure of attending the ISKO-UK 2009 conference earlier this week at University College London (UCL), organised in association with the Department of Inf ormation Studies. This was my first visit to the home of the architect of Utilitaria nism, J eremy Bentham, and the nearby St. Pancras International since it has been revamped - and what a smart train station it is.

The ISKO conference theme was 'content architecture', with a particular focus on:

"Integration and semantic interoperability between diverse resources – text, images, audio, multimedia
Social networking and user participation in knowledge structuring
Image retrieval
Information architecture, metadata and faceted frameworks"

The underlying themes throughout most papers were those related to the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and other Semantic Web inspired approaches to resolving or ameliorating common problems within our disciplines. There were a great many interesting papers delivered and it is difficult to say something about them all; however, for me, there were particular highlights (in no particular order)...

Libo Eric Si (et al.) from the Department of In for mation Science at Loughboro ugh University described research to develop a prototype middleware framework between disparate terminology resources to facilitate subject cross-browsing of information and library portal systems. A lot of work has already been undertaken in this area (see for example, HILT project (a project in which I used to be involved), and CrissCross), so it was interesting to hear about his 'bag' approach in which – rather than using precise mappings between different Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) (e.g. thesauri, subject heading lists, taxonomies, etc.) - "a number of relevant concepts could be put into a 'bag', and the bag is mapped to an equivalent DDC concept. The bag becomes a very abstract concept that may not have a clear meaning, but based on the evaluation findings, it was widely-agreed that using a bag to combine a number of concepts together is a good idea".

Brian Matthews (et al.) reported on an evaluation of social tagging and KOS. In particular, they investigated ways of enhancing social tagging via KOS, with a view to improving the quality of tags for improvements in and retrieval performance. A detailed and robust methodology was provided, but essentially groups of participants were given the opportunity to tag resources using tags, controlled terms (i.e. from KOS), or terms displayed in a tag cloud, all within a specially designed demonstrator. Participants were later asked to try alternative tools in order to gather data on the nature of user preferences. There are numerous findings - and a pre-print of the paper is already available on the conference website so you can read these yourself - but the main ones can be summarised from their paper as follows and were surprising in some cases:

"Users appreciated the benefits of consistency and vocabulary control and were potentially willing to engage with the tagging system;
There was evidence of support for automated suggestions if they are appropriate and relevant;
The quality and appropriateness of the controlled vocabulary proved to be important;
The main tag cloud proved problematic to use effectively; and,
The user interface proved important along with the visual presentation and interaction sequence."

The user preference for controlled terms was reassuring. In fact, as Matthews et al. report:

"There was general sentiment amongst the depositors that choosing terms from a controlled vocabulary was a "Good Thing" and better than choosing their own terms. The subjects could overall see the value of adding terms for information retrieval purposes, and could see the advantages of consistency of retrieval if the terms used are from an authoritative source."

Chris Town from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory presented two (see [1], [2]) equally interesting papers relating to image retrieval on the Web. Although images and video now comprise the majority of Web content, the vast majority of retrieval systems essentially use text, tags, etc. that surround images in order to make assumptions about what the image might be. Of course, using any major search engine we discover that this approach is woefully inaccurate. Dr. Town has developed improved approaches to content-based image retrieval (CBIR) which provide a novel way of bridging the 'semantic gap' between the retrieval model used by the system and that of the user. His approach is founded on the "notion of an ontological query language, combined with a set of advanced automated image analysis and classification models". This approach has been so successful that he has founded his own company, Imense. The difference in performance between Imense and Google is staggering and has to been seen to be believed. Examples can be found in his presentation slides (which will be on the ISKO website soon), but can observed from simply messing around on the Imense Picture Search.

Chris Town's second paper essentially explored how best to do the CBIR image processing required for the retrieval system. According to Dr. Town there are approximately 20 billion images on the web, with the majority at a high resolution, meaning that by his calculation it would take 4000 years to undertake the necessary CBIR processing to facilitate retrieval! Phew! Large-scale grid computing options therefore have to be explored if the approach is to be scalable. Chris Town and his colleague Karl Harrison therefore undertook a series of CBIR processing evaluations by distributing the required computational task across thousands of Grid nodes. This distributed approach resulted in the processing of over 25 million high resolution images in less than two weeks, thus making grid processing a scalable option for CBIR.

Andreas Vlachidis (et al.) from the Hypermedia Research Unit at the University of Gla morgan described the use of 'information extraction' techniques employing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to assist in the semantic indexing of archaeological text resources. Such 'Grey Literature' is a good test bed as more established indexing techniques are insufficient in meeting user needs. The aim of the research is to create a system capable of being "semantically aware" during document indexing. Sounds complicated? Yes – a little. Vlachidis is achieving this by using a core cultural heritage ontology and the English Heritage Thesauri to support the 'information extraction' process and which supports "a semantic framework in which indexed terms are capable of supporting semantic-aware access to on-line resources".

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the conference was that it was well attended by people outside the academic fraternity, and as such there were papers on how these organisations are doing innovative work with a range of technologies, specifications and standards which, to a large extent, remain the preserve of researchers and academics. Papers were delivered by technical teams at the World Bank and Dow Jones, for example. Perhaps the most interesting contribution from the 'real world' though was that delivered by Tom Scott, a key member of the BBC's online and technology team. Tom is a key proponent of the Semantic Web and Linked Data at the BBC and his presentation threw light on BBC activity in this area – and rather coincidentally complemented an accidental discovery I made a few weeks ago.

Tom currently leads the BBC Earth project which aims to bring more of the BBC's Natural History content online and bring the BBC into the Linked Data cloud, thus enabling intelligent linking, re-use, re-aggregation, with what's already available. He provided interesting examples of how the BBC was exposing structured data about all forms of BBC programming on the Web by adopting a Linked Data approach and he expressed a desire for users to traverse detailed and well connected RDF graphs. Says Tom on his blog:

"To enable the sharing of this data in a structured way, we are using the linked data approach to connect and expose resources i.e. using web technologies (URLs and HTTP etc.) to identify and link to a representation of something, and that something can be person, a programme or an album release. These resources also have representations which can be machine-processable (through the use of RDF, Microformats, RDFa, etc.) and they can contain links for other web resources, allowing you to jump from one dataset to another."

Whilst Tom conceded that this work is small compared to the entire output and technical activity at the BBC, it still constitutes a huge volume of data and is significant owing to the BBC's pre-eminence in broadcasting. Tom even reported that a SPARQL end point will be made available to query this data. I had actually hoped to ask Tom a few questions during the lunch and coffee breaks, but he was such a popular guy that in the end I lost my chance, such is the existence of a popular techie from the Beeb.

Pre-print papers from the conference are available on the proceedings page of the ISKO-UK 2009 website; however, fully peer reviewed and 'added value' papers from the conference are to be published in a future issue of Aslib Proceedings.

11 June 2009: the day Common Tags was born and collaborative tagging died?

2009-06-16T21:26:00.006+01:00

Mirroring the emergence of other Web 2.0 concepts, 2004-2006 witnessed a great deal of hyperbole about collaborative tagging (or 'folksonomies' as they are sometimes known). It is now 2009 and most of us know what collaborative tagging is so I'll avoid contributing to the pile of definitions already available. The hype subsided after 2006 (how active is Tagsonomy now?), but the implementation of tagging within services of all types didn't; tagging became and is ubiquitous.

The strange thing about collaborative tagging is that when it emerged the purveyors of its hype (e.g. Clay Shirky in particular, but there were many others) drowned out the comments made by many in the information, computer and library sciences. The essence of these comments was that collaborative tagging broke so many of the well established rules of information retrieval that it would never really work in general resource discovery contexts. In fact, collaborative tagging was so flawed on a theoretical level that further exploration of its alleged benefits was considered futile. Indeed, to this day, research has been limited for this reason, and I recall attending a conference in Bangalore in which lengthy discussions ensued about tagging being ineffective and entirely unscalable. For the tagging evangelists though, these comments simply provided proof that these communities were 'stuck-in-their-way' and harboured an unwillingness to break with theoretical norms. One of the most irritating aspects of the position adopted by the evangelists was that they relied on the power of persuasion and were never able to point to evidence. Moreover, even their powers of persuasion were lacking because most of them were generally 'technology evangelists' with no real understanding of the theories of information retrieval or knowledge organisation; they were simply being carried along by the hype.

The difficulties surrounding collaborative tagging for general resource discovery are multifarious and have been summarised elsewhere; but one of the intractable problems relates to the lack of vocabulary control or collocation and the effect this has on retrieval recall and precision. The Common Tags website summarises the root problem in three sentences (we'll come back to Common Tags in a moment…):

"People use tags to organize, share and discover content on the Web. However, in the absence of a common tagging format, the benefits of tagging have been limited. Individual things like New York City are often represented by multiple tags (like 'nyc', 'new_york_city', and 'newyork'), making it difficult to organize related content; and it isn’t always clear what a particular tag represents—does the tag 'jaguar' represent the animal, the car company, or the operating system?"

These problems have been recognised since the beginning and were anticipated in the theoretical arguments posited by those in our communities of practice. Research has therefore focused on how searching or browsing tags can be made more reliable for users, either by structuring them, mapping them to existing knowledge structures, or using them in conjunction with other retrieval tools (e.g. supplementing tools based on automatic indexing). In short, tags in themselves are of limited use and the trend is now towards taming them using tried and tested methods. For advocates of Web 2.0 and the social ethos it often promotes, this is really a reversal of the tagging philosophy - but it appears to be necessary.

The root difficulty relates to use of collaborative tagging in Personal Information Management (PIM). Make no bones about it, tagging originally emerged as PIM tool and it is here that it has been most successful. I, for example, make good use of BibSonomy to organise my bookmarks and publications. BibSonomy might be like delicious on steroids, but one of its key features is the use of tags. In late 2005 I submitted a paper to the WWW2006 Collaborative Tagging Workshop with a colleague. Submitted at the height of tagging hyperbole, it was a theoretical paper exploring some of the difficulties with tagging as general resource discovery tool. In particular, we aimed to explore the difficulties in expecting a tool optimised for PIM to yield benefits when used for general resource discovery and we noted how 'PIM noise' was being introduced into users' results. How could tags that were created to organise a personal collection be expected to provide a reasonable level of recall, let alone precision? Unfortunately it wasn't accepted; but since it scored well in peer review I like to think that the organising committee were overwhelmed by submissions!! (It is also noteworthy that no other collaborative tagging workshops have been held since.)

Nevertheless, the basic thesis remains valid. It is precisely this tension (i.e. PIM vs. general resource discovery) which has compromised the effectiveness of collaborative tagging for anything other than PIM. Whilst patterns can be observed in collaborative tagging behaviour, we generally find that the problems summarised in the Common Tags quote above are insurmountable – and this simply because tags are used for PIM first and foremost, and often tell us nothing about the intellectual content of the resource ('toPrint' anyone? 'toRead', 'howto', etc.). True – users of tagging systems can occasionally discover similar items tagged by other users. But how useful is this and how often do you do it? And how often do you search tags? I never do any of these things because the results are generally feeble and I'm not particularly interested in what other people have been tagging. Is anyone? So whilst tags have taken off in PIM, their utility in facilitating wider forms of information retrieval has been quite limited.

Common Tags

Last Friday the Common Tags initiative was officially launched. Common Tags is a collaboration between some established Web companies and university research centres, including DERI at the National University of Ireland and Yahoo!. It is an attempt to address the multifarious problems above and to widen the use of tags. Says the Common Tags website:

"The Common Tag format was developed to address the current shortcomings of tagging and help everyone—including end users, publishers, and developers—get more out of Web content. With Common Tag, content is tagged with unique, well-defined concepts – everything about New York City is tagged with one concept for New York City and everything about jaguar the animal is tagged with one concept for jaguar the animal. Common Tag also provides access to useful metadata that defines each concept and describes how the concepts relate to one another. For example, metadata for the Barack Obama Common Tag indicates that he's the President of the United States and that he’s married to Michelle Obama."

Great! But how is Common Tags achieving this? Answer: RDFa. What else? Common Tags enables each tag to be defined using a concept URI taken from Freebase or DBPedia (much like more formal methods, e.g. SKOS/RDF) thus permitting the unique identification of concepts and ameliorating some of our resource discovery problems (see Common Tags workflow diagram below). A variety of participating social bookmarking websites will also enable users to bookmark using Common Tags (e.g. ZigTag, Faviki, etc.). In short, Common Tags attempts to Semantic Web-ify tags using RDFa/XHTML compliant web pages and in so doing makes tags more useful in general resource discovery contexts. Faviki even describes them as Semantic Tags and employs the logo strap line, 'tags that make sense'. Common Tags won't solve everything but at least to will see some improvement recall and increase the precision in certain circumstances, as well as offering the benefits of Semantic Web integration.

So, in summary, collaborative tagging hasn't died, but at least now - at long last - it might become useful for something other than PIM. There is irony in the fact that formal description methods have to be used to improve tag utility, but will the evangelists see it? Probably not.

Serendipity reveals ontological description of BBC programmes

2009-06-12T17:53:00.007+01:00

I have been enjoying Flight of the Conchords on BBC Four recently. Unfortunately, I missed the first couple of episodes of the new series. So that I could configure my Humax HDR to record all future episodes, I visited the BBC website to access their online schedule. It was while doing this that I discovered visible usage of the BBC's Programmes Ontology. The programme title (i.e. Flight of the Conchords) is hyperlinked to an RDF file on this schedule page.

The Semantic Web is supposed to provide machine readable data, not human readable data, and hyperlinking to an RDF/XML file is clearly a temporarily glitch at the Beeb. After all, 99.99% of BBC users clicking on these links would be hoping to see further details about the programme, not to be presented with a bunch of angled brackets. Nevertheless, this glitch provides an interesting insight for us since it reveals the extent to which RDF data is being exposed on the Semantic Web about BBC programming, and the vocabularies the BBC are using. Researchers at the BBC are active in dissemination (e.g. ESWC2009, XTech 2008), but it's not often that you surreptitiously discover this sort of stuff in action at an organisation like this.

The Programme Ontology is based significantly on the Music Ontology Specification and the FOAF Vocabulary Specification, but their data deploys – admittedly not in the example below, except in the namespace declarations – Dublin Core and SKOS.

Oh, and the next episode of Flight of the Conchords is on tonight at 23:00, BBC Four.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf = "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:rdfs = "http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:foaf = "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:po = "http://purl.org/ontology/po/"
xmlns:mo = "http://purl.org/ontology/mo/"
xmlns:skos = "http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos#"
xmlns:time = "http://www.w3.org/2006/time#"
xmlns:dc = "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:dcterms = "http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:wgs84_pos= "http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
xmlns:timeline = "http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/timeline.owl#"
xmlns:event = "http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#">

<rdf:Description rdf:about="/programmes/b00l22n4.rdf">
<rdfs:label>Description of the episode Unnatural Love</rdfs:label>
<dcterms:created rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2009-06-02T00:14:09+01:00</dcterms:created>
<dcterms:modified rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2009-06-02T00:14:09+01:00</dcterms:modified>
<foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="/programmes/b00l22n4#programme"/>
</rdf:Description>

<po:Episode rdf:about="/programmes/b00l22n4#programme">
<dc:title>Unnatural Love</dc:title>
<po:short_synopsis>Jemaine accidentally goes home with an Australian girl he meets at a nightclub.</po:short_synopsis>
<po:medium_synopsis>Comedy series about two Kiwi folk musicians in New York. When Bret and Jemaine go out nightclubbing with Dave, Jemaine accidentally goes home with an Australian girl.</po:medium_synopsis>
<po:long_synopsis>When Bret and Jemaine go out nightclubbing with Dave, Jemaine accidentally goes home with an Australian girl. At first plagued by shame and self-doubt, he comes to care about her, much to Bret and Murray's annoyance. Can their love cross the racial divide?</po:long_synopsis>
<po:masterbrand rdf:resource="/bbcfour#service"/>
<po:position rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#int">5</po:position>
<po:genre rdf:resource="/programmes/genres/comedy/music#genre" />
<po:genre rdf:resource="/programmes/genres/comedy/sitcoms#genre" />
<po:version rdf:resource="/programmes/b00l22my#programme" />
</po:Episode>

<po:Series rdf:about="/programmes/b00kkptn#programme">
<po:episode rdf:resource="/programmes/b00l22n4#programme"/>
</po:Series>

<po:Brand rdf:about="/programmes/b00kkpq8#programme">
<po:episode rdf:resource="/programmes/b00l22n4#programme"/>
</po:Brand>
</rdf:RDF>

Quasi-facetted retrieval of images using emotions?

2009-06-12T07:48:00.005+01:00

As part of my literature catch up I found an extremely interesting paper in JASIST by S. Schmidt and Wolfgang G. Stock entitled, 'Collective indexing of emotions in images : a study in emotional information retrieval'. The motivation behind the research is simple: images tend to elicit emotional responses in people. Is it therefore possible to capture these emotional responses and use them in image retrieval?

An interesting research question indeed, and Schmidt and Stock's study found that 'yes', it is possible to capture these emotional responses and use them. In brief, their research asked circa 800 users to tag a variety of public images from Flickr using their scroll-bar tagging system. This scroll-bar tagging system allowed users to tag images according to a series of specially selected emotional responses and to indicate the intensity of these emotions. Schmidt and Stock found that users tended to have favourite emotions and this can obviously differ between users; however, for a large proportion of images the consistency of emotion tagging is very high (i.e. a large proportion of users frequently experience the same emotional response to an image). It's a complex area of study and their paper is recommended reading precisely for this reason (capturing emotions anyone?!), but their conclusions suggest that:

"…it seems possible to apply collective image emotion tagging to image information systems and to present a new search option for basic emotions."

To what extent does the image above (by D Sharon Pruitt) make you feel happiness, anger, sadness, disgust or fear? It is early days, but the future application of such tools could find a place within the growing suite of image filters that many search engines have recently unveiled. For example, yesterday Keith Trickey was commenting on the fact that the image filters in Bing are better than Google or Yahoo!. True. There are more filters, and they seem to work better. In fact, they provide a species of quasi-taxonomical facets: (by) size, layout, color, style and people. It's hardly Ranganathan's PMEST, but – keeping in mind that no human intervention is required - it's a useful quasi-facet way of retrieving or filtering images, albeit flat.

An emotional facet, based on Schmidt and Stock's research, could easily be added to systems like Bing. In the medium term it is Yahoo! that will be more in a position to harness the potential of emotional tagging. They own Flickr and have recently incorporated the searching and filtering of Flickr images within Yahoo! Image Search. As Yahoo! are keen for us to use Image Search to find CC images for PowerPoint presentations, or to illustrate a blog, being able to filter by emotions would be a useful addition to the filtering arsenal.

Bada Bing!

2009-06-11T20:11:00.003+01:00

So much has been happening in the world of search engines since spring this year. This much can be evidenced from the postings on this blog. All the (best) search engines have been active in improving user tools, features, extra search functionality, etc. and there is a real sense that some serious competition is happening at the moment. It's all exciting stuff…

Last week Microsoft officially released its new Bing search engine. I've been using it, and it has found things Google hasn't been able to. The critics have been extremely impressed by Bing too and some figures suggest that it is stealing market share and moving Yahoo! to the number 2 spot. What about number 1?

The trouble is that it doesn't matter how good your search engine is because it will always have difficulty interrupting users' habitual use of Google. Indeed, Google's own research has demonstrated that the mere presence of the Google logo atop a result set is a key determinant of whether a user is satisfied with their results or not. In effect, users can be shown results from Yahoo! but branded as Google, and vice versa, but will always choose the result with the Google branding. Thus, users are generally unable to tell whether there is any real difference in the results (i.e. their precision, relevance, etc.) and are actually more influenced by the brand and their past experience. It's depressing, but a reality for the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Ask, etc.

Francis Muir has the 'Microsoft mantra'. He predicts that in the long run Microsoft is always going to dominate Google – and I am starting to agree with him. Microsoft sit back, wait for things to unfold, and then develop something better than its previously dominant competitors. True – they were caught on the back foot with Web searching, but Bing is as at least as good as Yahoo!, perhaps better, and it can only get better. Their contribution to cloud computing (SkyDrive) offers 25GB storage, integration with Office and email, etc. and is far better than anything else available. Google documents? Pah! Who are you going to share that with? And then you consider Microsoft's dominance in software, operating systems, programming frameworks, databases, etc. Integrating and interoperating with this stuff over the Web is a significant part of the Web's future. Google is unlikely to be part of this, and for once I'm pleased.

It is not Microsoft's intention to take on Google's dominance of the Web at the moment. But I reckon Bing is certainly part of the long term strategy. The Muir prophecy is one step closer methinks.

Cracking open metadata and cataloguing research with Resource Description & Access (RDA)

2009-06-11T17:51:00.005+01:00

I have been taking the opportunity to catch up with some recently published literature over the past couple of weeks. While perusing the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (the magazine which complements JASIST), I read an interesting article by Shawne D. Miksa (associate professor at the College of Information, University of North Texas). Miksa's principal research interests reside in metadata, cataloguing and indexing. She has been active in disseminating about Resource Description & Access (RDA) and has a book in the pipeline designed to demystify it.

RDA has been in development for several years now, is the successor to AACR2 and provides rules and guidance on the cataloguing of information entities. I use the phrase 'information entities' since RDA departs significantly from AACR2. The foundations of AACR2 were created prior to the advent of the Web and this remains problematic given the digital and new media information environment in which we now exist. Of course, more recent editions of AACR2 have attempted to better accommodate these developments, but fire fighting was always order of the day. The now re-named Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA has known for quite some time that an entirely new approach was required – and a few years ago radical changes to AACR2 were announced. As my ex-colleague Gordon Dunsire describes in a recen t D-Lib Magazine article:

"RDA: Resource Description and Access is in development as a new standard for resource description and access designed for the digital world. It is being built on the foundation established for the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). Although it is being developed for use primarily in libraries, it aims to attain an effective level of alignment with the metadata standards used in related communities such as archives, museums and publishers, and to provide a better fit with emerging database technologies."

The ins and outs of RDA is a bit much for this blog; suffice to say that RDA is ultimately designed to improve the resource discovery potential of digital libraries and other retrieval systems by utilising the FRBR conceptual entity-relationship model (see this entity-relationship diagram at the FRBR blog). FRBR provides a holistic approach to users' retrieval requirements by establishing the relationships between information entities and allowing users to traverse the hierarchical relationships therein. I am an advocate of FRBR and appreciate its retrieval potential. Indeed, I often direct postgraduate students to Fiction Finder, an OCLC Research prototype which demonstrates the FRBR Work-Set Algorithm.

Reading Miksa's article was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, RDA has fallen off of my radar recently. I used to be kept abreast of RDA development through the activities of my colleague Gordon, who also disseminates widely on RDA and feeds into the JSC's work. Miksa's article – which announces the official release of RDA in second half of 2009 – was almost like being in a time machine! RDA is here already! Wow! It only seems like last week when JSC started work on RDA (...but it was actually over 5 years ago…).

The development of RDA has been extremely controversial, and Miksa alludes to this in her article – metadata gurus clashing with traditional cataloguers clashing with LIS revolutionaries. It has been pretty ugly at times. But secondly – and perhaps more importantly – Miksa's article is a brilliant call to arms for more metadata research. Not only that, she notes areas where extensive research will be mandatory to bring truly FRBR-ised digital libraries to fruition. This includes consideration of how this impacts upon LIS education.

A new dawn? I think so… Can the non-believers grumble about that? Between the type of developments noted earlier and RDA, the future of information organisation is alive and kicking.

Fight! Google Squared vs. WolframAlpha

2009-06-04T09:44:00.002+01:00

By now we all realise that WolframAlpha is not intended to compete with Google's Universal Search; it's a 'computational knowledge engine' designed to serve up facts, data and scientific knowledge and is an entirely different beast. Nevertheless, Google is not a company to be outdone and has just announced the release of Google Squared which, if the technology press is to be believed, is Google's attempt to usurp WolframAlpha's grip on offering up facts, data and knowledge. Indeed, Google attempted to steal WolframAlpha's thunder by announcing that Google Squared was in development on the same day Stephen Wolfram was unveiling WolframAlpha for the first time a few weeks ago. Meow!

In the same way that WolframAlpha occupies a different intellectual space to most web search engines, Google Squared seems to be quite different to WolframAlpha. Says the Official Google Blog:

"Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed."

Google Squared appears to work best when the query submitted is conducive to comparing species of, say, snakes or country rock bands. With the former you retrieve a variety of snake types, images, description, as well as biological taxonomic classification data, and with the latter genre and date of band formation is retrieved (including Dillard & Clark and the Flying Burrito Brothers), in addition to images and descriptions. Many of the data values are incorrect, but Google has been quite forthright in stating that Google Squared to extremely experimental ("This technology is by no means perfect"; "Google Squared is an experimental search tool"). Of course, Google wants us to explore their canned searches, such as Rollercoasters or African countries, to best appreciate what is possible.

As we noted recently though, place names are good to test these systems and, like WolframAlpha, some bizarre results are retrieved. A search for Liverpool seems to only retrieve facts on assorted Liverpool F.C. players, and Glasgow retrieves persons associated with Glasgow and the death of Glasgow Central train station in 1989(!) I had hoped Google Squared's comparative power might have pulled together facts and statistics on Glasgow (UK) with the ten or so places named Glasgow in the USA and Canada. A similar result would have been expected for Liverpool or Manchester (which has far, far more), but alas. This is a particular shame owing to the fact that much of this data is available on Wikipedia in a relatively structured format, with disambiguation pages to help.

Google Squared allows users to correct data, remove erroneous results or suggest better results. The effect of this is a dynamically evolving result set. A search for a popular topic an hour ago can yield an entirely different result an hour later. All of this will help Google Squared become more accurate and cleverer over time.

Although Google Squared and WolframAlpha are quite different, there are some similarities. For this reason it is possible to state that the current score is 1-0 to WolframAlpha.

Image searching with Creative Commons

2009-05-27T13:16:00.007+01:00

Student information literacy skills have been discussed on the blog before. In short, they are woeful. One area where students tend to have little understanding is in the area of intellectual property rights (IPR). The situation might be looking better for digital music, but in my experience it remains poor for other digital artefacts, particularly images. 'Twas only a few weeks ago while was in a lab with some undergraduate students for a web technologies module when I discovered most of them were ripping images from the web for inclusion within their information gateways. While this can (in some circumstances) be tolerated within the confines of an educational institution, it remains copyright infringement owing to copying by 'reprographic means' - and this isn't behaviour we want to become habitual in our graduates. My brother (a graphic designer and new media guru) has spun me many a yarn about ex-colleagues who have been shown their P45 for engaging in IPR theft (e.g. reusing someone's basic design or photograph).

All of this is veering away from the original reason for this blog though, which is to draw attention to some new image searching functionality on Yahoo! Image Search. Following on nicely from the Search Options post, the Yahoo! Search Blog has just announced the inclusion of some extra search filters for image result sets. Not only is it better than Google (and more accurate?), but it also includes a useful Creative Commons (CC) filter. Using a similar interface to Yahoo! Search Assist, Yahoo! Image Search allows users to apply a CC checkbox to filter for images, with specific filters included for commercial reuse and/or remixing. This is particularly useful to embellish those PowerPoint presentations or to illustrate a blog, or for those undergraduate students building an information gateway, or to avoid getting a P45!

There appears to be a downside, unfortunately. When I saw the Yahoo! Search Blog announcement I thought (perhaps naively) that Yahoo! was starting to put into practice its commitment to metadata, Semantic Web specifications, and other structured data. Since I know my personal homepage is indexed by Yahoo! and uses XHTML+RDFa to notify intelligent agents that its page content falls under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, I thought I'd put an Image Search to the test. Providing the CC namespace is referenced, the XHTML+RDFa required is simple. For example:

<p>Content on <a href="http://www.staff.ljmu.ac.uk/bsngmacg/" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">George Macgregor</a>'s website is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a></p>

...and with specific CC reference to my foaf:depiction...

<img src="img/georgedepiction.jpg" alt="Image of George Macgregor" rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" property="foaf:depiction" content="George Macgregor"/>

My filtered CC search was unsuccessful though. This disappointed me; but then I observed the following notice:

"Note: Only Flickr images are supported currently."

Flickr – which is a subsidiary of Yahoo! – has allowed users to conduct advanced searches of its publicly uploaded images for quite some time. This has included CC searching. And it would appear that Yahoo! has integrated Flickr searching functionality into Image Search, albeit with some nice tweaks. If I had read their blog in its entirety I would have realised this; I just clicked the link such was my excitement about Yahoo! Image Search!

It's useful to have this functionality within a conventional searching tool, but it is disappointing that Image Search isn't using cleverer means of doing it (e.g. RDFa) rather than relying on the preferences of Flickr users when they upload their images. Don't get me wrong, this is useful and most welcome, and it will save me time on occasion, but it would be exciting to crack CC image searching beyond the controlled Flickr environment. Hopefully the 'currently' in "Only Flickr images are supported currently" will mean that my expectations will be met soon…

Light relief: Celtic fringes erased by WolframAlpha?!

2009-05-18T23:28:00.004+01:00

With WolframAlpha launched on Friday, I spent much of my weekend trying to get a 'computable request' to compute. Not until Monday morning did a request compute – but its performance has been getting better ever since so hopefully we will all have more time to experiment with it over coming days and weeks...

Like me, Gwenda Mynott has been testing WolframAlpha and has been searching for things that, a) you have a good knowledge of, and, b) a topic that WolframAlpha can easily compute. Places are good for this (e.g. countries, towns, cities, etc.), and Stephen Wolfram computes multiple locations to good effect in his demonstrations; however, Gwenda tried to 'compute' Wales and arrived at some bizarre results. Check them out. WolframAlpha doesn't retrieve data pertaining to the constituent nation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (i.e. Wales as you or I would tend to know it!), but a small town in South Yorkshire by the name of Wales (?) The only other obvious option WolframAlpha provides is Wales (New York, USA), which is equally amiss.

Hmmmmm. If this is the result for Wales, what are the results for the rest of the UK? Well, that's equally controversial. England appears to be synonymous with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland is referred by WolframAlpha back to the Kingdom of Scotland, which ceased to exist after the Act of Union in 1707. Worse than that, Northern Ireland doesn't even exist! ("WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input") Cornish nationalists will also be dismayed to learn that Cornwall (Canada) is the only one that counts.

Is this a systematic attempt to erase the history, culture and memory of the Celtic fringes?! Of course not. The results might be strange, but from a knowledge engine point of view – and ontologically speaking - Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are subsumed by the larger geographical and political entity of the UK, so it's understandable that WolframAlpha computes the answer in this way. Still, the England/UK synonymy is a bit odd and must have been encoded by someone somewhere sometime!

Experiment away, folks - and I would encourage everyone to post their most bizarre / illogical data results as comments to this blog. A prize will go to the most outlandish!

Some more 'Search Options'...

2009-05-15T15:57:00.005+01:00

I promised not to blog about Google any time soon for fear the blog becomes known as the unofficial Google blog. After some consideration I thought, 'pish posh!' Anyway, the post has a wider remit than just Google...honest!

The absence of retrieval aids for Google users (oh no, not again - I hear you cry!) has been discussed at great length on this blog before. To appreciate the extent of this deficiency we need only peruse some innovative rival search engines such as Ask (recently re-branded back to Ask Jeeves), Yahoo!, or Clusty. Google has been making changes though and today the Official Google Blog announced some further enhancements to the universal Google search interface. Simply called, 'Search Options', these tools let you "slice and dice" results, apply rudimentary filters, and generate alternative views of results. Search Options does a little bit more to help the user in query formulation (the area where I think Google is weakest), but also offers some useful functionality once you have your results.

Check out our usual canned search for 'communism in Russia'; 'click' the 'Search options…' link in the top left had corner of the interface to reveal the Search Option tools.

Filters are available for videos, forums and reviews (the latter being fairly useful if you are shopping). Various publication time filters are also available. Nothing here is particularly mind blowing though.

Search Options gets a bit more interesting when the search display options are explored in a little detail. Firstly, it's possible to request details of related searches. These are displayed in a better page location than before and look similar to Yahoo! Search Assist. But it is now also possible to select the 'Wonder Wheel' which generates a visualisation of the related terms. I'm unsure how useful the Wonder Wheel really is, particularly as the true nature of the relationships between terms is impossible for Google to represent other than in syntactic terms; this is something the Semantic Web community is obviously trying to resolve.

Most interesting though is the 'Timeline' tool. This allows results to be displayed along, erm, yup, a timeline. The timeline is clickable allowing the user to drill down into particular temporal zones and to view resources relating to that zone. I use the word 'interesting' because although the timeline is probably quite useful for historical research, its moment of introduction is the most interesting part. Indeed, the timeline functionality looks in part like Google is bracing itself for the release of WolframAlpha, which is due any day now (or tonight?) – and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this announcement was an attempt to steal some of its thunder. This appears to have been combined with the demonstration of Google Squared at the Google Searchology conference a few days ago. No Google Squared prototypes appear to be available for us to experiment with, but TechCrunch got a sneaky peak at Searchology (view the YouTube video below). Google Squared is, in essence, Google's answer to WolframAlpha.

For me the most interesting news to emerge alongside Search Options is Google's desire to make greater use of RDFa. RDFa is probably a little pedestrian for me, but it's better than nothing – and at least there is a clear intention of using some Semantic Web specifications. It's just a shame Yahoo! announced something similar but more radical almost 18 months ago.

LCSH as Linked Data ... officially!

2009-05-01T10:27:00.004+01:00

Yesterday was, in my estimation, pretty historic. The Library of Congress officially launched the LC Authorities and Vocabularies service. You might recall a previous post relating to lcsh.info in which I lamented the LC's decision to pull down a SKOS demonstrator of LCSH, explicitly designed to explore the possibilities of Linked Data and dereferenceable URIs. All the background is in the previous post; but the whole episode appears to have been a PR disaster for LC.

The great news is that the LC Authorities and Vocabularies service (let's call it LCAV henceforth, shall we?) officially re-launched lcsh.info in a bigger, better and much improved form. The service essentially enables both humans and machines to access a plethora of LC authority data. Like lcsh.info, the service employs Semantic Web approaches to exposing this data and implements approaches to Linked Data by exposing and linking data on the Web via dereferenceable URIs.

Five minutes exploring the website reveals that LCAV serves up the entire LCSH for free, with incredible search and browse functionality, leaving Connexion in the shade. The concept URIs point to detailed data modelled in SKOS as RDFa for human readability, but with links to SKOS as RDF/XML, N-Triples and (the less familiar?) JSON for machine processing. RDF graphs can even be visualised by clicking, well, the 'visualize' tab – incredible. Mappings to other vocabularies are also provided.

Check out this heading for Semantic Web, for example.

On top of all this, LCSH can be downloaded in its entirety as RDF/XML or N-Triples (SKOS)! LCAV also indicate that further authority data will be made available soon.

Make no bones about it, this is historic stuff, not only because the service is so good but because this terminological data is no longer locked down. I think it's important to stroke our imaginary beards over the significance of the LC's change of direction. Is this the beginning of the end for locked down terminological data?! Will they be like dominoes henceforth? A fiver says DDC does the same by the end of the year. Any takers???

WolframAlpha and destructive hype

2009-04-30T18:26:00.010+01:00

If you have been plugged into the search engine or technology news feeds over recent months you may have encountered the excitement surrounding WolframAlpha. WolframAlpha is a Web search tool to be launched in May which – apart from having a good name – is anticipated to be the next Google exterminator. Although being touted as a destroyer of Google, the technology commentators indicate that WolframAlpha will inhabit an entirely different intellectual space on the Web.

WolframAlpha is described by its creators as a "computational knowledge engine" which, instead of retrieving resources using conventional automatic indexing methods, dynamically computes the answers to a wide variety of questions. The way in which it does this remains a mystery, but we do know that it models particular areas of knowledge. It then combines this with a vast repository of curated data harvested from disparate data sources and some ingenious natural language processing algorithms to represent knowledge. These knowledge representations can then be queried to answer real questions. Stills sounds like an enigma; but it must work on some level given the hype around it. Mustn't it?!

The brainchild of Dr. Stephen Wolfram (purveyor of computer algebra), WolframAlpha has had information and computer scientists and technology commentators salivating for months. The trouble is that while the incessant hype continues, an increasing number of people (me, but some commentators) are growing increasingly cynical of its true capabilities; we want to see a demo, or some kind of prototype. Mindful that cynicism could be spreading, Wolfram unveiled his creation yesterday for the first time at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society (via a sold-out Web cast - clip from YouTube below). This demonstration appears to have further stimulated the hype (judging by some headlines), but has simultaneously added to the increasing cynicism. Hype and 'vapourware' exasperates people. And this is where the hype could actually be death of WolframAlpha, rather than Google.

In reality, it certainly sounds like WolframAlpha is not out to compete with Google; but it doesn't matter, this is how it is being described in the media and WolframAlpha hasn't tried to dispel the myth. In his blog, Wolfram describes WolframAlpha as "a new paradigm for using computing and the Web". It immediately provides people with a Google yardstick and false expectations; most new users will not understand that WolframAlpha is an entirely different beast. But more importantly, it's setting WolframAlpha up for an almighty fall.

Remember Cuil? People also thought Cuil was going to change the face of searching but it failed. It was hotly anticipated and was hyped, arguably more, than WolframAlpha. This hype did it no favours when it crashed on its launch day. It's only been 9 months since Cuil was officially launched, yet we never hear about it, nor do any of us use it. In part, this is because its indexes are so poor. My LJMU profile page was updated on 08 November 2008, almost 6 months ago; yet, Cuil still returns this page as it was on 07 November 2008 as a result. This is extremely feeble when you consider that Microsoft Live Search refreshes its indexes every 20 days.

Along with the hype, this was Cuil's 'blind spot'. A blind spot is normally tolerated in the early days of an innovative Web tool, but inflated expectations breeds intolerance. WolframAlpha is bound to have its own blind spot; what will it be and will users be tolerant until it's fixed? Probably not. They therefore have to get it right on launch day.

The moral of this tale is simple. Hyperbole must end. It's destructive and in the long run it does nobody any favours.

Web 2.0? Show me the money!

2009-04-07T12:46:00.003+01:00

Just a quick post... Today the Guardian blog reports on the financial woes of YouTube. I don't suppose we should be particularly surprised to learn that according to some news sources YouTube is due to drop $470 million this year. When this figure is compared to the $1.65 billion pricetag Google paid a couple of years ago we can appreciate the magnitude of their YouTube predicament. The majority of this loss is attributable to the failure of advertising to bring home the bacon; a recurring issue on this blog. But huge running costs, copyright and royalty issues have played their part too. Google is reportedly interested in purchasing Twitter, but surely their failure to monetise YouTube - a service arguably more monetiseable (?) than Twitter - should have the alarm bells ringing at Google HQ?

I find the current crossroads for many of these services utterly fascinating. I don't have any solutions for any of these ventures, other than to make sure you have a business model before starting any business. Would RBS give me a business loan without a business plan and a robust revenue model? Probably not. But then they are not giving loans out these days anyway...

ASK conundrum revisited...again!

2009-03-25T08:02:00.005Z

I posted a blog about Google's eye tracking research last month. I'm loathed to discuss Google again lest the ISG blog becomes known as the unofficial Google blog; however, the latest post on the Official Google Blog is worthy of some comment...

You might recall another post I made regarding search engine research and development, particularly in the area of information retrieval (IR) aids for users. In this posting I summarised Belkin's research and theories regarding the Anomalous State of Knowledge (ASK). Most of this and subsequent research has sought to introduce IR aids for the user so that they can better solve their ASK conundrum. This assistance varies but often takes the form of query expansion (in its various permutations), browsable subject trees to stimulate query formulation, relevance feedback, and so forth. Providing such tools in systems based on automatic indexing is difficult, but we noted that some search engines have introduced some effective retrieval aids, all designed to alleviate the ASK problem. For example, Yahoo! provides its search assist tool, Clusty provides related concept clusters, and Ask provides other similar tools. Their accuracy in IR varies widely, but overall they prove useful to user. Unfortunately, we also noted that Google provides few user aids comparable to those above, arguably relying more on its PageRank algorithm. Not any longer...

Today Google launched some interface functionality not dissimilar to Yahoo! search assist and Clusty. Their assistance provides some suggested related searches and some extra result summary text for particular results. Receiving this assistance depends on the nature of your query, so have a look at this canned search: 'communism in Russia'. This isn't bad and is better than nothing; but does it really measure up to the aids provided by competing search engines? Compare the results for these canned searches and the IR aids provided for the user by the systems we've discussed already:

Yahoo! search assist: query term = communism in Russia
Clusty: query term = communism in Russia
Ask: query term = communism in Russia

Google's attempts appear quite pedestrian by comparison. Yahoo! and Clusty, for example, make their aids readily available so that the user can affect changes in their information seeking behaviour, but Google's tools are far less visible, less detailed, and offer far less functionality. Since a lot of research indicates that many users will not scroll below the 'golden triangle' (i.e. to the bottom of the first result set), it is entirely feasible to think that these 'related search' aids will go unnoticed by the disoriented information seeker.

It is good to see Google deploying user query aids and reacting to developments in other IR systems, but it appears that it will be some time before Google can be said to alleviate users' Anomalous State of Knowledge.

Who's going to teach our "stuff"? and who's going to learn it?

2009-03-17T20:29:00.004Z

Is this the right forum for this? We all know of the imminent and unwelcome restructuring facing us. Where does the future lie for this discipline, or can we even define what our discipline is? We're constantly reminded now that our HE degrees are products, our students are customers, and so what are we, retailers? Compared to many other "products" in this HE marketplace our products are relatively unpopular despite the fact that there are fewer universities providing what we do compared to a decade ago.
I constantly struggle to explain what it is we do and can therefore understand why students have difficulty in placing it in context. Perhaps a business school isn't the right environment but then neither is a computing department, or it doesn't seem to be, and we don't fit into education or anywhere else.
What is the long term future for this discipline, whatever it is?

It's St. Patrick's day (not St. Paddy's, or St. Pat's or Paddy's day) so I'm off for Guinness in the local.

Text is the new GUI?

2009-02-19T13:37:00.003Z

We've got a software student ( from another University) working on his final year project at my day job. He is busy adding a 'speech' interface to our Laboratory tracking system. The idea is that while the scientist has their hands in the fume cupboard they don't want to be messing with a mouse or a keyboard why not engage with the computer by voice. This is after all how they did it in the old future in the movies.

Alas the student has got a bit sidetracked into the excitement of speech recognition and synthesis, in an attempt to get him to some sort of conclusion of his project I have suggested that most of the academic benefit of the project could be got by just having a text input and output (although useless in the fume cupboard). Once you go there it starts you thinking about how we interact with systems by voice. We are of course now used to listening to SatNav and some folk order their phones to phone the wife.

While pondering this and Georges earlier post of Twitter Library fees, I was thinking about an article about how fans have put together Twitter accounts of their favourite T.V. characters so that we can see when they are having a sandwich during the week. It made me wonder whether we might soon be engaging with various systems through the power of text rather than super 3D graphical interfaces.

This will be a shame as much of the design thought in web design and business application design has been about mice and windows more or less. In Liverpool this has led to some success for the hybrid 'programmer/graphic designer', perhaps if we are going to deal in a flow of text it will be the Hybrid 'programmer/DJ' or at least 'programmer/Linguist' who lead the way.

We surround ourselves in an increasing sense of a flow of consciousness through Twitter/Facebook etc. Surely this is going to include a Twitter from machines.

"Your fridge is enjoying a quiet day."
"Your car is worrying that it's service is due this week."
"Your door notes that fido is standing at it and wants to go out."

This will lead us to a wish to push application outputs into twitter like streams for our apps to respond to our own twitters. Text (or speech) may be the new GUI. Of course we will have to know a lot more about parsing and extracting meaning and identity from these streams of conciousness.

FOAF and political social graphs

2009-02-12T15:51:00.006Z

While catching up on some blogs I follow, I noticed that the Semantic Web-ite Ivan Herman posted comments regarding the US Congress SpaceBook – a US political answer to Facebook. He, in turn, was commenting on a blog made by the ProgrammableWeb – the website dedicated to keeping us informed of the latest web services, mashups, and Web 2.0 APIs.

From a mashup perspective, SpaceBook is pretty incredible, incorporating (so far) 11 different Web APIs. However, for me SpaceBook is interesting because it makes use of semantic data provided via FOAF and the microformat, XFN. To do this SpaceBook makes good use of the Google Social Graph API, which aims to harness such data to generate social graphs. The Social Graph API has been available for almost a year but has had quite a low profile until now. Says the API website:

"Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you're left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful -- as a user, you might want to see who else you're connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn't been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers."

Bravo! This creates some neat connections. Unfortunately – and as Ivan Herman regrettably notes - the generated FOAF data is inserted into Hilary Clinton’s page as a page comment, rather than as a separate .rdf file or as RDFa. The FOAF file is also a little limited, but it does include links to her Twitter account. More puzzling for me though is why the embedded XHTML metadata does not use Qualified Dublin Core! Let's crank up the interoperability, please!

Information seeking behaviour at Google: eye-tracking research

2009-02-06T19:30:00.006Z

Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden have just published a posting on the Official Google Blog summarising some eye-tracking research they have been conducting on Google's 'Universal Search'. Both are active in information seeking behaviour and human-computer interaction research at Google and are well published within the related literature (e.g. JASIST, IPM, SIGIR, CHI, etc.).

The motivation behind their research was to evaluate the effect incorporation of thumbnail images and video within a research set has on user information seeking behaviour. Previous information retrieval eye-tracking research indicates that users scan results in order, scanning down their results until they reach a (potentially) relevant result, or until they decide to refine their search query or abandon the search. Aula and Rodden were concerned that the inclusion of thumbnail images might distract the "well-established order of result evaluation". Some comparative evaluation was therefore order of the day.

"We ran a series of eye-tracking studies where we compared how users scan the search results pages with and without thumbnail images. Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted."

A good finding for Google, of course; but most astonishing is the eye-tracking data. The speed with which users scanned result sets and the number of points on the interface they scanned was incredible. View the 'real time' clip below. A dot increasing in size denotes the length of time a user spent pausing at that specific point in the interface or result set. Some other interesting discoveries were made – the full posting is essential reading.

Wikipedia: the new Knol?

2009-01-30T10:48:00.005Z

Like many people I use Wikipedia quite regularly to check random facts. The strange aspect of this behaviour is that once I find the relevant fact, I have to immediately verify its provenance by conducting subsequent searches in order to find corroborative sources. It makes one wonder why one would use it in the first place.

Wikipedia continues to be plagued by a series of high profile malicious edits. Unfortunately, many of these edits aren't necessarily malicious. They are just wrong or inaccurate. There are probably hundreds of thousands of inaccurate Wikipedia articles, perhaps just as many hosting malicious edits; but it takes high profile gaffs to affect real change. On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, Wikipedia reported the deaths of West Virginia's Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy, who had collapsed during the inaugural lunch. Both reports were false.

This event appears to have compelled Jimmy Wales into being more proactive in improving the accuracy and reliability of Wikipedia. Under his proposals many future changes to articles would need to be approved by a group of vetted editors before being published. For me this news is interesting, particularly as it emerges barely two weeks after Google announced that the 100,000th Knol had been created on their 'authoritative and credible' answer to Wikipedia: Knol. Six or seven months ago the discussions focussed on how Knol was the new Wikipedia, now it appears as if Wikipedia might become the new Knol. How bizarre is that?!

Tightening the editing rules of Wikipedia has been on the agenda before and in 2007 this blog discussed how the German Wikipedia was conducting experiments which saw only trusted Wikipedians verifying changes to articles. So, will tightening the editing of Wikipedia make it the new Knol? The short answer is 'no'. Some existing Wikipedia editors can already exert authoritarian control over particular articles and can – in some cases – give the impression that they too have an axe to grind on particular topics. 'Wikipinochets' anyone? Moreover, Knol benefits from its "moderated collaboration" approach, with Knols being created by subject experts whose credentials have been verified. Wikipedia isn't going anywhere near this. Guardian columnist, Marcel Berlins, is probably right about Wikipedia when he states:

"I don't think there's a way of telling what proportion of Wikipedia entries are deficient, whether because of the writer's bias, mischief or lack of knowledge. It's clear that a significant number are questionable, sufficient to lead us to suspect all entries. But to do the right thing - vetting all contributors or contributions - would be impractical and hugely expensive. There is no easy solution. We many just have to accept that Wikipedia's undoubted usefulness comes at the price of occasional - perhaps frequent - inaccuracy. That is a sad conclusion to reach about an encyclopedia."

Oh well, back to verifying random facts found on Wikipedia.

SKOS-ifying Knowledge Organisation Systems: a continuing contradiction for the Semantic Web

2008-12-24T09:00:00.016Z

A few days ago Ed Summers announced on his blog that he was shutting down lcsh.info. For those that don't know, lcsh.info was a Semantic Web demonstrator developed by Ed with the expressed purpose of illustrating how the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) could be represented and its structure harnessed using Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems (SKOS). In particular, Ed was keen to explore issues pertaining to Linked Data and the representation of concepts using URIs. He even hoped that the URIs used would be Cool URIs, linking eventually to a bona fide LCSH service were one ever to be released. Sadly, it was not to be... The reasons remain unclear but were presumably related to IPR. As the lcsh.info blog entry notes, Ed was compelled to remove it by the Library of Congress itself. The fact that he was the LC's resident Semantic Web buff probably didn't help matters, I'm sure.

SKOS falls within my area of interest and is an initiative of the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group. In brief, SKOS is an application of RDF and RDFS and is a series of evolving specifications and standards used to support the use of knowledge organisation systems (KOS) (e.g. information retrieval thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems, taxonomies or any other controlled vocabulary) within the framework of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is many things of course; but it is predicated upon the assumption that there exists communities of practices willing and able to create the necessary structured data (generally applications of RDF) to make it work. This might be metadata, or it might be an ontology, or it might be a KOS represented in SKOS. The resulting data can then be re-used, integrated, interconnected, queried and is open. When large communities of practice fail to contribute, the model breaks down.

There is a sense in which the Semantic Web has been designed to bring out the schizophrenic tendencies within some quarters of the LIS community. Whilst the majority of our community has embraced SKOS (and other related specifications), can appreciate the potential and actively contributes to the evolution of the standards, there is a small coterie that flirts with the technology whilst simultaneously shirking at the thought of exposing hitherto proprietary data. It's the 'lock down' versus 'openness' contradiction again.

In a previous research post I was involved with the High-Level Thesaurus (HILT) research project and continue my involvement in an consultative capacity. HILT continues to research and develop a terminology web service providing M2M access to a plethora of terminological data, including terminology mappings. Such terminological data can be incorporated into local systems to improve local searching functionality. Improvements might include, say, implementing a dynamic hierarchical subject browsing tree, or incorporating interactive query expansion techniques as part of the search interface, for example. An important - and the original motivation behind HILT - is to develop a 'terminology mapping server' capable of ameliorating the "limited terminological interoperability afforded between the federation of repositories, digital libraries and information services comprising the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information Environment" (Macgregor et al., 2007), thus enabling accurate federated subject-based information retrieval. This is a blog so detail will be avoided for now; but, in essence, HILT is an attempt to provide a terminology server in a mash-up context using open standards. To make the terminological data as usable as possible and to expose it to the Semantic Web, the data is modelled using SKOS.

But what happens to HILT when/if it becomes an operational service? Will its terminological innards be ripped out by the custodians of terminologies because they no longer want their data exposed, or will the ethos of the model be undermined as service administrators permit only HE institutions or charitable organisations from accessing the data? This isn't a concern for HILT yet; but it is one I anticipated several years ago. And the sad experience of lcsh.info illustrates that it's a very real concern.

Digital libraries, repositories and other information services have to decide where they want to be. This is a crossroads within a much bigger picture. Do they want their much needed data put to a good use on the Web, as some are doing (e.g. AGROVOC, GEMET, UKAT)? Or do they want alternative approaches to supplant them entirely (i.e. LCSH)? What's it gonna be, punks???

Wikipedia censorship: allusions to 'Smell the Glove'?

2008-12-08T09:23:00.006Z

Another Wikipedia controversy rages, this time over censorship. Over the past two days, the Internet Watch Foundation informed some ISPs that an article pertaining to an album by the 'classic' German heavy metal band, Scorpions, may be illegal. Leaving aside the fact that Scorpions is one of many groups to have similar imagery on their record sleeves (the eponymous 1969 debut album by Blind Faith, Eric Clapton's supergroup, being another obvious example), am I the only person to notice the similarities with fictional rockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap?

Like metal, censorship is a heavy topic; but I thought this tenuous linkage with This Is Spinal Tap might be a welcome distraction from the usual blog postings, which are necessarily academic. Those of you familiar with said film might recall the controversy surrounding the proposed (tasteless) art work for Spinal Tap's new album (Smell the Glove), which in the end gets mothballed owing to its indecent nature. Getting into trouble over sleeve art is part and parcel of being in a heavy metal band it would seem! Enjoy the winter break, people!

Some general musings on tag clouds, resource discovery and pointless widgets...

2008-12-05T21:02:00.012Z

The efficacy of collaborative tagging in information retrieval and resource discovery has undergone some discussion on this blog in the past. Despite emerging a good couple of years ago – and like many other Web 2.0 developments – collaborative tagging remains a topic of uncertainty; an area lacking sufficient evaluation and research. A creature of collaborative tagging which has similarly evaded adequate evaluation is the (seemingly ubiquitous!) 'tag cloud'. Invented by Flickr (Flickr tag cloud) and popularised by delicious (and aren't you glad they dropped the irritating full stops in their name and URL a few months ago?), tag clouds are everywhere; cluttering interfaces with their differently and irritatingly sized fonts.

Coincidentally, a series of tag cloud themed research papers were discussed at one of our recent ISG research group meetings. One of the papers under discussion (Sinclair & Cardew-Hall, 2008) conducted an experimental study comparing the usage and effectiveness of tag clouds with traditional search interface approaches to information retrieval. Their work is welcomed since it constitutes one of the few robust evaluations of tag clouds since they emerged several years ago.

One would hate to consider tag clouds as completely useless – and I have to admit to harbouring this thought. Fortunately, Sinclair and Cardew-Hall found tag clouds to be not entirely without merit. Whilst they are not conducive to precision retrieval and often conceal relevant resources, the authors found that users reported them useful for broad browsing and/or non-specific resource discovery. They were also found to be useful in characterising the subject nature of databases to be searched, thus aiding the information seeking process. The utility of tag clouds therefore remains confined to the search behaviours of inexperienced searchers and – as the authors conclude - cannot displace traditional search facilities or taxonomic browsing structures. As always, further research is required...

The only thing saving tag clouds from being completely useless is that they can occasionally assist you in finding something useful, perhaps serendipitously. What would be the point in having a tag cloud that didn't help you retrieve any information at all? Answer: There wouldn't be any point; but this doesn't stop some people. Recently we have witnessed the emergence of 'tag cloud generation' tools. Such tools generate tag clouds for Web pages, or text entered by the user. Wordle is one such example. They look nice and create interesting visualisations, but don't seem to do anything other than take a paragraph of text and increase the size of words based on frequency. (See the screen shot of a Wordle tag cloud for my home page research interests.)

OCLC have developed their very own tag cloud generator. Clearly, this widget has been created while developing their suite of nifty services, such as WorldCat, DeweyBrowser, FictionFinder, etc., so we must hold fire on the criticism. But unlike Wordle, this is something OCLC could make useful. For example, if I generate a tag cloud via this service, I expect to be able to click on a tag and immediately initiate a search on WorldCat, or a variety of OCLC services … or the Web generally! In line with good information retrieval practice, I also expect stopwords to be removed. In my example some of the largest tags are nonsense, such as "etc", "specifically", "use", etc. But I guess this is also a fundamental problem with tagging generally...

OCLC are also in a unique position in that they have access to numerous terminologies. This obviously cracks open the potential for cross-referencing tags with their terminological datasets so that only genuine controlled subject terms feature in the tag cloud, or productive linkages can be established between tags and controlled terms. This idea is almost as old as tagging itself but, again, has taken until recently to be investigated properly. Exploring the connections between tags and controlled vocabularies is something the EnTag project is exploring, a partner in which is OCLC. In particular, EnTag (Enhanced Tagging for Discovery) is exploring whether tag data, normally typified by its unstructured and uncontrolled nature, can be enhanced and rendered more useful by robust terminological data. The project finished a few months ago – and a final report is eagerly anticipated, particularly as my formative research group submitted a proposal to JISC but lost out to EnTag! C'est la vie!

Catching up with the old future of databases

2008-11-28T11:02:00.003Z

We have been discussing in the group what we should be teaching on our Business Information Systems undergraduate course. Which is having a bit of a revamp. One area of discussion is about the areas of 'databases' which we teach mostly in the students second year and 'object oriented analysis and design' (but mostly analysis) which we teach in their final year.

When I used to teach database sections 10 years ago to business students we used to teach a history of:-

file access
hierarchical databases
network databases
relational databases
object oriented databases.

Of course Object Oriented Databases hadn't happened in a big way back then. The surprising thing is that they haven't happened in a big way even now, they have spent 10 years being the next big thing. Meanwhile their close relatives UML based analysis and object oriented design and development have swept in from all directions. Strange that my notes from 10 years back now look like 'Space 1999', In their predictive powers. In my day job at Village we had a book on the subject 10 years back but a quick check of the book shelf shows we have long since recycled it.

Apparently believers and developers of Object Oriented Databases are just bemused by why everybody hasn't followed them into the promised land, particularly as much time is spent on 'Object Relational Mapping' technologies.

All round software development and architecture thinker and general purpose bearded Guru Martin Fowler, believes that the issue isn't to do with the general capabilities of the Object Oriented Databases but rather the fact that much integration in corporations occurs in the data layer not the business layer hence systems are dependent on standardised SQL approaches to integration. He suggests in his blog post on the subject that this shared database integration requirement has been holding back the march to the future of Object Oriented Databases. Creating extra inertia. Indeed, a confession, in my day job despite being Object Oriented N-Tier architecture developers by trade and conviction, when it came to tying our own timesheet system to our task management system we used database level triggers. It's a bit like the fact that there are better ways to do typing that using qwerty but we've all learnt to live with qwerty.

However with the movement towards using Web Services and SOA type architectures in effect making XML the linguq franca rather than SQL, Martin Fowler suggests that the field might start to loosen up. Although I wonder whether reporting is another issue. We produce some reports (in Crystal Reports and the equivalent) straight from our business objects, but other management reports really need to be produced straight off the (SQL) database. On occasions this is seperate from the main thrust of the application using a different technology stack.

Really the technology of the day in software development is Object Relational Mapping tools, ORMS. These try and hold the Object Oriented businesss layer to the Data Entity Oriented database layer. Such connections are relatively straightfoward in an unsophisticated design. My final year students currently angsting over a UML assignment will find that their Class Diagram is much the same as their Entity Relationship Diagram. But as you move deeper into doing things the Object way the two diverge. My Village colleague Ian Bufton and I have been discussing this in terms of lining up the two layers using either tools or code generation you can see some of his initial ponderings on his blog.

Luckily these types of contemplation are outside the scope of the things that our Information Systems students at the Business School, no doubt they have to worry about how to teach it at the Computer Science department.