SV: [Sigia-l] Findability

[Gunnar Langemark]

> Well, I do wish that more people would realize that simple
> categorization and taxonomies are not going to take anyone very far on
> the road towards findability.

I wasn't talking about simple categorization but about faceted metadata
which - as far as I understand it - is a quite different ball game. I'm not
the expert on this topic. But the facets ensure that we are not talking
about:

>Hierarchies

in a simple form, as they

> do not describe the world
> very well, whether they be taxonomies, thesauri,

as you write.

But you continue:

>or something else.

and here we disagree.
If description is at all possible - "something else" MUST be able to
describe the world well. Albeit all description is by nature reductionist -
or else we would be talking about simulation and virtual reality. But now
we're in the realm of nitpicking and hairsplitting. ;)


> When you use them you nearly always end up with ill-defined categories
> that cannot really be used for any form of automated processing, and
> which do not really help searching very much, either.

What I AM talking about is the individuals opportunity to take control of
his own contextualization so to speak, and the ability to connect different
sets of categories - and the ability to choose your peers with whom you
share categorization systems. This is power.
There is the potential to balance individual power with automation.
It does not happen without an effort.
But if we all react with a negative attitude - it is sure that we will not
even gain new insights.
I guess that if your ideal is full fledged automation - even faceted
metadata wouldn't do the trick, and individual power over categories would
be counterproductive.
If however, your ideal is power to the user, faceted metadata, and
distributed metadata, and syndication - might prove to be the concepts along
which, work could be done in order to empower us all - individually - with
the tools needed to connect to the right content on the web.

>
> If, on top of this, your ability to connect content with concepts is
> also limited, then creating a model useful for navigation becomes
> pretty much impossible.

I simply want to be able to connect to others (and their content) who I
personally choose to connect to, and to be able to automate some of the
tasks.
What I am talking about is the personalization of content search and
aggregation.


> I've seen enough systems built with thesauri
> and taxonomies by now to know that in bigger hierarchical systems
> there is usually a lot of very useful information buried, but it *is*
> buried. Getting the real data out of the mire is usually quite a bit
> of work.

I agree that content tend to be buried in large systems with single
hierarchies. But if facets are not part of the solution - what IS your
solution to it?


Gunnar Langemark
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mail: gunnar at langemark.com
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