Harvesting and distributing semantic data: FOAF and Firefox

One of the most attractive aspects of Mozilla Firefox continues to be the incessant supply of useful (and not-so useful) Extensions. The supply is virtually endless, and long may it continue! (What would I do without Zotero, or Firebug?!) We have seen the emergence of some useful metadata tools, such as Dublin Core metadata viewers, and more recently, Semantic Web widgets. Operator is an interesting example of the latter, harnessing microformats and eRDF in a way that allows users to interact easily with some simple semantic data (e.g. via toolbar operations). Another interesting Firefox extension is Semantic Radar.

Semantic Radar is a "semantic metadata detector" for Firefox and is a product of a wider research project based at DERI, National University of Ireland. Semantic Radar can identify the presence of FOAF, DOAP and SIOC data in a webpage (as well as more generic RDF and RDFa data) and will display the relevant icon(s) in the Firefox status bar to alert the user when such data is found. (See screen shot for FOAF example) Clicking the icon(s) enables users to browse the data using an online semantic browser (e.g. FOAF Explorer, SIOC Browser). In short, Semantic Radar parses web pages for RDF auto-discovery links to discover semantic data. A neat tool to have...


Semantic Radar has been available for sometime, but a recent update to the widget means that it is now possible to automatically 'ping' the Ping The Semantic Web website. Ping The Semantic Web (PTSW) is an online service harvesting, storing and distributing RDF documents. If one of those documents is updated, its author can notify PTSW to that effect by pinging it with the URL of the document. This is an amazingly efficient way to disseminate semantic data. It is also an amazingly effective way for crawlers and other software agents to discover and index RDF data on the web. (URLs indexed by PTSW can be re-used by other web services and can also be viewed on the PTSW website (See screenshot of PTSW for my FOAF file)).


It might just be me, but I’m finally getting the sense that the volume of structured data available on the web - and the tools necessary to harness it - are beginning to reach some sort of critical mass. The recent spate of blogs echoing this topic bare testament to that (e.g. [1], [2]). Dare I use such a term, but Web 3.0 definitely feels closer than ever.

R.I.P advertising: Business models on the Web

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC News technology guru and blogger at BBC dot.life, posted some interesting musings about Firefox 3 yesterday. Mozilla Firefox 3 is due for final release in June 2008. One controversial development, however, is the 'awesome bar' - controversial owing to the manner in which it gathers data on user searching behaviour...

Seemingly – and probably unsurprisingly if one gives it a second thought – the Mozilla Foundation have struggled to keep their head above water. How does the "poster-child of the open-source movement" keep a staff of 160? Until fairly recently the majority of revenue was generated from Mozilla branded merchandise. Incredible that the browser you are probably using to read this blog was created by a bunch of people selling T-shirts to keep their passion afloat. As Google have demonstrated, the true Web money is in information retrieval and intelligent advertising. To this end Yahoo! is attempting to rejuvenate itself in the face of Microsoft by (hopefully) revolutionising information retrieval through leveraging structured data (e.g. metadata, Semantic Web data, microformats, etc.) – because that is the honey pot. For Mozilla, the Firefox awesome bar is set to supplement revenue generated by the default Firefox Google search box. But as Raju Vegesna acknowledges, "People are realising that advertising is not good for everything, that it's not going to make them the next Google". This is simply because not enough people look at adverts.

But this post is a general musing on Web business models. Sure - open-source is about user emancipation. And those innovative enough (i.e. Mozilla) will find good revenue generating tools, ultimately based on advertising. But what about Web journalism, or Web 2.0 services? How are they going to put dinner on the table in 3-4 years time? Has our unbounded enthusiasm to provide everything for free during the mid to late 1990s created a business model nightmare today? Have we passed the point of no return?

These aren't new questions, but they are questions we continue to agonise over. While the Future of Journalism conference attendees do a little more agonising, the pioneers of Web 2.0 engage in their own head scratching. As we learned a few weeks ago, Bubble 2.0 might burst soon; many are finding advertising difficult and some openly acknowledge that a robust business model was a secondary concern for their Web 2.0 enterprise. Others are resorting to subscription to pay the bills. Is it time to acknowledge that – except for the few (i.e. Google et al.) – advertising, as the basis for an e-business model, is finally dying?

Bubble 2.0: brace yourself

Tim Berners-Lee would have us think that the label 'Web 2.0' is a piece of jargon and a complete misnomer. There is some validity in his argument. The majority of technologies commonly associated with Web 2.0 applications have been at the disposal of developers since well before Bubble 1.0 burst. Even the social and collaborative aspects that have - rightly or wrongly - become synonymous with Web 2.0 were well versed by Amazon (since 1995!) and eBay. That the web has entered a new phase of development is incontrovertible though; but when I think of Web 2.0 I prefer to focus on the use of web service APIs to create new information services and harnessing the potential of structured data (e.g. applications of XML, RDF, etc.).

Be that as it may, Web 2.0 has now been with us for a few years because people believe it is actually happening; that Web 2.0 is upon us all. 2005-2008 has witnessed a proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 companies, many 'built to be bought'. Was del.icio.us really worth $30 million when Yahoo! bought it in late 2005?

This frenzy of activity, aggressive over speculation, and the impending credit crunch now has many technology and financial commentators (and protagonists) nervous. Bubble 2.0 is soon to burst. High stock values and high P/E ratios simply contribute to this perception. The storm clouds do indeed seem to be gathering over Silicon Valley and a near certain second dot-com crash is approaching (Adam Lashinsky's article inspired this post). Perhaps if people had been listening to Tim Berners-Lee at the beginning of the Web 2.0 phenomenon things wouldn't have spiraled out of control; enthusiasm might have been tempered.

The ridiculous nature of the Web 2.0 scenario and its impending doom can never be properly articulated by the technology or business press. It takes popular culture to deliver a good, hard slap to the face. To this end the Richter Scales provide us with an astute appraisal of the current state of Web 2.0, its tenuous origins and its future, all to the tune of 'We didn't start the fire' by Billy Joel. Enjoy 'Here comes another bubble'. It's educational.


Here Comes Another Bubble - Richter Scales

Shout 'Yahoo!' : more use of metadata and the Semantic Web

Within the lucrative world of information retrieval on the web, Yahoo! is considered an 'old media company'; a company that has gone in a different direction to, say, Google. Yahoo! has been a bit patchy when it comes to openness. It is keen on locking data and widgets down; Google is keen on unlocking data and widgets. And to Yahoo!'s detriment, Google has discovered that there is more money to be made their way, and that users and developers alike are – to a certain extent - very happy with the Google ethos. Google Code is an excellent example of this fine ethos, with the Google Book Search API being a recently announced addition to the Code arsenal.

Since there must be some within Yahoo! ranks attributing their current fragility to a lack of openness, Yahoo! have recently announced their Yahoo! Search 'open platform'. They might be a little slow in fully committing to openness, but cracking open Yahoo! Search is a big and interesting step. For me, it's particularly interesting...

Yesterday Amit Kumar (Product Management, Yahoo! Search) released further details of the new Yahoo! Search platform. This included (among many other things), a commitment to harnessing the potential of metadata and Semantic Web content. More specifically, this means greater support of Dublin Core, Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) and other applications of RDF (Resource Description Framework), Creative Commons, and a plethora of microformats.

Greater use of these initiatives by Yahoo! is great news for the information and computing professions, not least because it may stimulate the wider deployment of the aforementioned standards, thus making the introduction of a mainstream 'killer app' that fully harnesses the potential of structured data actually possible. For example, if your purpose is to be discovered by Google, there is currently no real demand for Dublin Core (DC) metadata to be embedded within the XHTML of a web page, or for you to link to an XML or RDF encoded DC file. Google just doesn't use it. It may use dc.title, but that's about it. That is not to say that it's useless of course. Specialist search tools use it, Content Management Systems (CMS) use it, many national governments use it as the basis for metadata interoperability and resource discovery (e.g. eGMS), it forms the basis of many Information Architecture (IA) strategies, etc, etc. But this Google conundrum has been a big problem for the metadata, indexing and Semantic Web communities (see, for example). Their tools provide so much potential; but this potential is generally confined to particular communities of practice. Your average information junkie has never used a Semantic Web tool in his/her life. But if a large scale retrieval device (i.e. Yahoo!) showed some real commitment to harnessing structured data, then it could usher in a new age of large scale information retrieval; one based on an intelligent blend of automatic indexing, metadata, and Semantic Web tools (e.g. OWL, SKOS, FOAF, etc.). In short, there would be a huge demand for the 'data web' outside the distinct communities of practice over which librarians, information managers and some computer scientists currently preside. And by implication this would entail greater demand for their skills. All we need to do now is get more people to create metadata and ontologies!

Given the fragile state of Yahoo!, initiatives like this (if they come to fruition!) should be applauded. Shout 'Yahoo!' for Yahoo! I'm not sure if it will prevent a Microsoft takeover though...

Death by librarian!

Electroacoustic popsters from the antipodes, Haunted Love, provide this seductive pop ditty, paying tribute the to craft of librarianship - although I don't recall squashing patrons in between the book stacks as part of this craft. Interesting too is the absence of any ICT!

The video has been around for a while, but I thought it might be a welcome distraction from the usual blog postings, which are necessarily academic.

Wearing an Information System Hair Shirt (Talk Talk)

What have we done. I’ve been forced to wear an information system hair shirt, here’s why.

Popular consciousness would have us think that scientists seem to amble through life inventing weaponry and new life forms that probably won’t mutate into the wild. We wonder if they will ask themselves ‘what have we done’. There is another breed of scientist who takes their own action on the cheek injecting themselves with disease and the trial vaccines. In the information systems world we are also producing mutant commercial life forms in the form of giant workflow driven operations. My 15 month effort to get ‘Free Broadband’ with UK telco TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk other dysfunctional telephone companies are available) leaves me thinking ‘what have I done’.

Commercial IS analysts and developers seek to breakdown tasks into a series of workflows and then build information systems that offer operators, or via e-commerce the punters themselves, access to these workflows. This has allowed us to create low cost call centre led support operations for giant machines such as telephone companies, other utilities and banks. This works cheaply and well until your workflow relationship with the company falls, on the one less travelled by.

It is a bit like printing out a Google map for how to get from A to B. You get a set of instructions ‘Turn right at Missing Sign Road 780 yards’. This all works well until you fall off the path laid down for you then you realise you are lost and haven’t got a real map in the car.

So it seems to be with workflow driven companies you operate cheaply and well until you fall off the path, at this point you enter a Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ strangely held down by a faceless system.

In the case of my experience with TalkTalk my original promised go live date November 2006 is now a distant memory. There have been dozens of phone calls and many hours on hold after which you are met by well trained customer professionals to calm and ease your mind. From my side of the phone it feels like they look up your file see that something has gone wrong with ‘provisioning’ and then on screen have a huge button marked ‘re-provision then wish customer a happy day’. I spend my time trying to dissuade them from pressing that button while I try to explain that their predecessors have already tried that.

That puts me on the very edge of the workflow, in desperation they suggest I phone back a different number or on some occasions put me through to the experts departments with names such as ‘sales’, ‘engineering escalation’, ‘customer retention’ and ‘complaints’. These people operate on the outer edge of the workflow and attempt to push you back into the mainstream, although in my case I think I am beyond help as they end up assuring me that they will phone back in the next 48 hours, 72 hours tops. However much I argue that that is what the last guy said they explain that they can’t understand what went wrong there and they will definitely phone back scouts honour. No one ever has.

Every time I go through this loop (I try to every 5 or 6 weeks) it makes me frustrated and angry so why do I bother you and my wife ask. Well it is a bit like the scientist injecting the vaccine into himself. By living at the rough end of a large companies workflow systems I remember my own humanity and perhaps approach the giant Information Systems we espouse with a bit more caution.

Talk Talk is my hair shirt that reminds me of the danger of Information System sin. Perhaps next time the operator at Talk Talk will instead of putting me through to the department of ‘Repentance, Platitude and False Promises’ they could put me through to the company chaplain.

The 'Google Generation' mentality spreads beyond 'the kids'...

The undergraduate students coming through LJMU (particularly those in level one and our future undergraduates) are fully paid-up members of the so-called 'digital generation'. Strange as it is for those born before 1989, the digital generation have never known life without the Internet or the web. Bizarre, isn't it?! Perhaps more derogatively, these digital kids have been labelled – perhaps justifiably – as the 'Google Generation'; kids that rely on a single search engine to satisfy their information needs, a search engine that is incapable of tapping a 'deep web' six times the size of the surface web. These are the kids that are incapable of engaging in critical research proficiently, apparently.

Such users have been known to the library, computer and information science fields for some time as the 'satisfied inept' – another pejorative label for the kids. All this negative labelling of 'the kids' does get depressing though. The Google Generation may therefore be pleased to learn that recently published research indicates the Google Generation is now being replaced by a wider 'Google Society'.

Funded by the JISC and the British Library, the respected CIBER research team at University College London note that despite student familiarity with IT, most rely on the most basic search tools and lack some of the most basic analytical skills required to evaluate and retrieve information on the web. No surprise there. However, the research report ('Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future') also found that research-behaviour traits commonly associated with the digital generation (e.g. intolerance of remotely sluggish information retrieval systems, impatience with navigational systems, reluctance to use alternative - but more effective - search tools, etc.) are now typical among all age groups. The report makes all sorts of recommendations, including urgent government action with respect to information literacy and for digital libraries to up their game (which I think many are doing…).

This is all interesting stuff and echoes some of what Bill Thompson noted recently on Leading Edge, and which was commented upon on this blog. But returning the focus back to the digital generation (or Google Generation), my experience of undergraduate students is that many of them – even the 'techies' – not only lack information literacy skills, but actually lack familiarity with IT, even with humdrum applications like MS Office. This phenomenon is highlighted in the CIBER report, with student familiarity of Internet Explorer and MS Word at 100%, but knowledge of spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, etc. very low – and these are just basic everyday applications. Am I isolated in my experience with students? Should the urgent government action with respect to information literacy also include more emphasis on the ICT literacy we thought already existed?

Shifting back again to the 'satisfied inept' theme (did we ever leave?!), the most interesting research paper I read that encountered this phenomenon was by Barnum et al. (2004) when exploring the effectiveness of back-of-book indexes in information retrieval within e-books. They evaluated a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader e-Book utilising an index with the locators hyperlinked to the page reference for each entry. They then compared this to an alternative version of the same e-book. The difference with the latter version was that it didn't include an index but relied on the full-text search capabilities provided by Acrobat Reader. Barnum et al. derived extremely interesting results. Users found more relevant information, more quickly and efficiently, using the index than they did using free-text searching; however, when asked which they prefer, the users said 'free-text' searching. When told they performed better with the index (mainly due to difficulties with query formulation), they still said that they would continue to use free-text searching. How frustrating is that?

Like CIBER say, urgent information literacy skills is clearly necessary for the Google Society; however, for the Google Generation currently working their way through university now, the carrots need to be made a lot more attractive. We have to coax students out of their habitual and almost ritualistic use of the major search engines, just enough so that they can appreciate what they've been missing since they were born. To that end, perhaps the use of a big stick might be better?!

DeweyBrowser: beta forever!

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

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

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

Microsoft Listas: a chicken or egg conundrum?

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

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

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

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

Slippery Mental Glossary particularly those trickey intranet portal things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the way from America...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop the press: Google is grim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MTSR 2007

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

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

Interviewing Graduates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia closing the doors?

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

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

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