[Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation

[Victor Lombardi]

At 4/17/2002 -0700 09:10 AM, Peter Merholz wrote:
>Another point of extension, which Victor mentioned, is building a bridge to
>more of the hardcore technical types--the database administrators, computer
>programmers, systems engineers, and other folks whose systems we will
>increasingly rely upon, and whose systems need to be increasingly aware of
>our requirements.

To elaborate, I'm thinking of bridging those who know a lot about library 
science and those who are determining our future computing standards, like 
the W3C. Although the larger ASIST organization does this, it wasn't 
represented at the IA Summit, which I think represents the current state of 
our everyday work.

Example: LIS folks talk about controlled vocabularies and the W3C folks 
talk about ontologies. They're different tools for different tasks but 
they're all organization schemes. But each of these two communities aren't 
overlapping much, and it seems they have a lot to learn from each other. As 
someone who doesn't belong to either camp, I'm finding it useful to absorb 
both approaches.

I'm also interested because the W3C-like folks can define standards *and* 
quickly implement them. So their vision of the future Internet might be 
more likely to come about than other's visions. SMTP/POP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, 
XML...that's what we're designing to now. So when they talk about a web 
ontology language (not a web taxonomy language or a web thesauri language), 
I'm sitting up and taking notice.


Victor Lombardi
http://www.noisebetweenstations.com/

















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