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

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 Information Studies. This was my first visit to the home of the architect of Utilitarianism, Jeremy 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 Information Science at Loughborough 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 Glamorgan 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.

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

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 recent 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.