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 Seman
tic 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 par
ticular, 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 t
o 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 tes
t 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.
