I spoke with Lowell Anderson, VP of Marketing of SchemaLogic today. He called me because my book talks about a couple of their clients. Here’s what I learned:

SL helps companies figure out how their various knowledge silos connect by building ontologies that express the relationships among the terms they use. Thesauruses identify synonyms so people can continue using their accustomed vocabularies. SL thinks in RDF but end up exporting to non-RDF XML frequently in order to support applications such as Sharepoint.

They like to start with publicly-available ontologies and then enable the client to customize. Or, they’ll start with any existing taxonomies. For example, the Associated Press had 40-50K words in their standard vocabulary. SL sucked it into their system and then provided the tools by which “subject-matter experts” (e.g., editors) could identify weaknesses (using a graphical view) and make changes. Changes that affect another experts’ domain, even by linking to it, require permission from the other expert. The permission management system is configurable to each client’s needs and is one of the key advantages of the SL system.

SL provides no tagging tools for users and readers. It is a top-down system. Compared to the systems or lack of systems it replaces, however, it looks wild and loose. For example, the International Press Telecommunications Council had a complex taxonomy of topics (which I discuss less than enthusiastically in my book) that it stored in an Excel spreadsheet. The new ontology includes many more relationships. And at the AP, although editors have to fill in change request forms and get permission from other editors, the old process had a central committee making all decisions. From my point of  view, ontologies capture lots of information. They of course don’t capture all information. Bottom up adds information well. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room for it all in the gigantic miscellaneous pile.

Andrew Keen and I, helpfully joined by Willem Velthoven, debated last week on Radio Netherlands. You can hear it here.

Clay Shirky – who I thank profusely in EiM because of how influential and helpful he was, even though he may not know it – responds to Nick Carr’s criticism of page 9 of my book. Then he responds to Sven Bikerts’ complaints about the blogosphere’s effect on literary criticism.

It’s a rousing defense and brilliantly expressed. Thank you, Clay, once again. [Tags: clay_shirky nicholas_carr music everything_is_miscellaneous]

I just wrote the following to a mailing list where someone had a thoughtful post about the way in which Google both provides for miscellaneous ordering but also structures the miscellany:

I don’t focus on Google or searching only because it’s too
familiar to my intended readers, but it’s certainly a central
mechanism for dealing with the “miscellaneous.” And I agree that
Google’s decisions (corporate-political and the decisions embodied in
its algorithms) structure the user’s ability to find what she needs
and put pieces together in meaningful ways. That is inevitable, though
(I think), and it’s why we need many, many different ways of
organizing on the way out. The ability of a user to find and organize
pieces inevitably (?) depends on what metadata is available in the
pile of stuff. That metadata may come from many different sources —
in the case of Google: the author’s decision about which words to
include in her text, the SEO’s decision about which words to put
towards the front or to use repeatedly, the rest of the Web’s
“decision” about whether and how to link to the page, Google’s
decisions about which elements to weigh and which sites to crawl – but
the user’s ability to find and organize on the way out is constrained
by the ever-increasing metadata present in the pile.

That is indeed one of the weaknesses of the “miscellaneous” metaphor.
A truly miscellaneous pile consists of things with no significant
likenesses (outside of their all belong within a particular domain —
your kitchen miscellaneous drawers contains items that belong in a
kitchen and that fit in a drawer). The miscellaneous as I use the term
consists of a pile ever richer with relationships. That disanalogy
between the usual use of the term and mine (along with the inclusion
of the word “disorder” in the subtitle) have understandably led some
to think that the book advocates chaos. Actually, I’m enthusiastic
about exactly the opposite: The development of an infrastructure
super-saturated with meaning.

The BBC has announced a new umbrella initiative called the Digital Media Initiative that seems to be focused on the BBC’s internal media development processes. Given that since I turned in the final draft of “Everything Is Miscellaneous” the BBC backslid from its commitment to radically open up its media resources – a trend I acknowledged briefly in the book itself – could this be the BBC embracing openness again?

It’s hard to tell because the information is so high level. But it’s encouraging to see a couple of mentions of getting the metadata right, including “at the point of knowledge” (a weird phrase I assume means basically that the creators provide the metadata) but also “gradually enhanced to facilitate effective exploitation of content throughout the asset’s life.” No mention of it being enhanced by the listeners/viewers/re-users even within the BBC, but maybe that’s part of it. And, maybe the commitment to “support open standards” will result in support externally, rather than relying on Microsoft software. [Tags: bbc metadata media]

The Biologists Helping Bookstores blog reports on another in its guerrilla librarianship raids, in which it reshelves non-science books out of the science shelves.

I’m sympathetic. It drives me nuts to see New Age self-help books shelved in the philosophy sections. But…shelving not only expresses beliefs about the topic, it also serves as a non-semantic look-up system. When an employee doesn’t know where a book is shelved, she looks it up in the computer. So, while re-shelving maintains the purity of the topic, it also hides the re-shelved books. And I’m not crazy about that.

Damn first order of order! (Thanks to Brian Christiansen for the link.)

Brand Eins magazine has run Steffan Heuer’s interview with me about all things miscellaneous.

You will be impressed by my flawless German, thanks to the magic of speaking in English and being translated.

Tim Spalding at LibraryThing has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ’em up good. For example, Freakonomics has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]

Chris Shioyama at Gyaku has a great review that not only likes the book (thank you) but discusses it in detail. I’m very comfortable with how Chris explains the book.

At the end, he criticizes me for not crediting the importance of language and, in particular, for not seeing that the post-geographic divisions will be linguistic. (Chris cites Clay on this point.) FWIW, I certainly agree that linguistic divisions are real. In EiM’s terms, they matter because they are under-girded by semantic differences that can’t ever be fully overcome (because translation is always rewriting).

AKMA, whose opinion I value highly (he’s one of the voices in the back of my head as I write about some topics – “What would Akma say about this?”), says  nice things about my book. He disputes 5% of it, however, and wonders if the difference between then and now warrants saying there’s a whole new order of order. I’ve replied in the comments.