[Sigia-l] Librarians and the Memetic Web

[Listera]

Bob Doyle:

> Imagine that we had a way of simply tagging meaning in web pages.

There are three fundamental issues with that sentence: "simply," "meaning"
and "pages."

The notion of a (web) "page" is fairly archaic. A web page, if we're to be
constrained by it, may not always be the unit of coverage for a single
"meaning". Conversely, a "page" may contain multiple "meanings." And nothing
about tagging potentially trillions of anything is "simple."
 
> And we could give each meme a globally unique identifier

Only if you insist on not decoupling it from its container, the "page". What
happens, to cite one example, when a "page" with a unique ID contains
multiple, nested Ajax-driven, changing parts that, in turn, change the
"meaning" of surrounding parts and, indeed, the root container, the "page"?
That's where we're headed.

> We would need a sort of Union Catalog of memes,

Yahoo directories are pretty much dead.

> but without the classifying and cataloging skills of librarians
> this might be an impossible task.

You think there are sufficient numbers of librarians to do this, or are you
proposing a Manhattan-project sized Librarian Employment Act? I don't see
where exactly librarians effectively fit into this scheme?

> It can only be accomplished by distributing most of the work to those
> with a vital interest in a meme.

Most people with a "vital interest in a meme" are not librarians.

> Mapping and linking the memes we call memography. Finding the memes is
> almost unbelievably easy and produces the librarian's holy grail - near
> perfect precision and recall - using nothing but today's full-text
> search engines!

For starters, entity extraction/inference engines (while currently starting
at $250,000 and up) can generate what you call "memes" orders of magnitude
faster than homo sapiens (librarians or not) in terms of volume and
cost-effectiveness.
 
> Because we are adding meaning (semantics),

I don't see how this is adding meaning or, even more pretentiously,
semantics in the now-conventional understanding of semantics grounded in
*relationships*. 

> This is the most important book you can read about your future. It
> certainly changed my life.

More important than the Bible? :-)

Do you find Flickr unacceptable?
Is it too 'un-orderly' for you?
Are librarians the chosen few to bring order to that chaos?
Are you aware of the linguistic/semantic/technical/etc issues engendered by
centrally-managed taxonomies that scale to Internet-proportions?
Who do you think should govern highly contentious
political/ethnic/commercial/etc "meanings"?

IOW, "a way of simply tagging meaning in web pages" is a dream many has held
for longer than a decade...and remains so. You have a monumental battle in
convincing people of its tangible benefits given the work involved in
bringing it to a critical mass.

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.