This document specifies an abstract model for Dublin Core metadata. The primary purpose of this document is to specify the components and constructs used in Dublin Core metadata. It defines the nature of the components used and describes how those components are combined to create information structures. It provides an information model which is independent of any particular encoding syntax. Such an information model allows us to gain a better understanding of the kinds of descriptions that we are encoding and facilitates the development of better mappings and cross-syntax translations.

Identifying and labeling things is what we all do every day; it is how we communicate about the things in the world around us, e.g. “please pass the salt” or “my ticket is for seat D3”. Identifying things and assigning identifiers to them is also a fundamental part of working in the digital realm. We need to identify resources, concepts, agents, relationships, mappings, properties, namespaces, schemas, profiles, etc. Many of these have confusing subtleties of meaning, so it may help to deconstruct the identification processes we perform intuitively so we can reconstruct a sensible approach to designing our identifiers. This paper looks at how we identify things by comparing the sameness of their characteristics, how we associate symbols with things to simplify identifying them, and concludes there are six aspects that make up an identifier: a thing, a symbol, an association, a context, an agent, and a remembrance. It then considers some of the qualities of identifiers in more detail: scope, uniqueness, granularity, intelligence, actionability, persistence, extensibility, and context. It finally provides a simple checklist for designing identifiers.

Standardization is one of the defining aspects of modern life, its presence so pervasive that it is usually taken for granted. However cumbersome, onerous, or simply puzzling certain standards may be, their fundamental purpose in streamlining procedures, regulating behaviors, and predicting results is rarely questioned. Indeed, the invisibility of infrastructure and the imperative of standardizing processes signify their absolute necessity. Increasingly, however, social scientists are beginning to examine the origins and effects of the standards that underpin the technology and practices of everyday life. Standards and Their Stories explores how we interact with the network of standards that shape our lives in ways both obvious and invisible. The main chapters analyze standardization in biomedical research, government bureaucracies, the insurance industry, labor markets, and computer technology, providing detailed accounts of the invention of "standard humans" for medical testing and life insurance actuarial tables, the imposition of chronological age as a biographical determinant, the accepted means of determining labor productivity, the creation of international standards for the preservation and access of metadata, and the global consequences of "ASCII imperialism" and the use of English as the lingua franca of the Internet. Accompanying these in-depth critiques are a series of examples that depict an almost infinite variety of standards, from the controversies surrounding the European Union's supposed regulation of banana curvature to the minimum health requirements for immigrants at Ellis Island, conflicting (and ever-increasing) food portion sizes, and the impact of standardized punishment metrics like "Three Strikes" laws. The volume begins with a pioneering essay from Susan Leigh Star and Martha Lampland on the nature of standards in everyday life that brings together strands from the several fields represented in the book. In an appendix, the editors provide a guide for teaching courses in this emerging interdisciplinary field, which they term "infrastructure studies," making Standards and Their Stories ideal for scholars, students, and those curious about why coffins are becoming wider, for instance, or why the Financial Accounting Standards Board refused to classify September 11 as an "extraordinary" event.

This document provides guidelines about best practices in writing specifications, so that the risk of having interoperability (or portability) failures between implementations is reduced. The target audience is primarily specification writers and TC members.

We don’t live in the binary producer/consumer world anymore. Even if we did, there is simply too much data to deal with. Its stewards simply do not have all necessary expertise or resources to organize it most effectively and flexibly. Without doubt, this involves plenty of technical challenges (standards, interfaces, infrastructure). But these are trivial in comparison to the real challenge: shifting community expectations that erroneous metadata can and should be edited by researchers themselves. And while we’re at it, we might broaden our view of metadata to include not only the usual fields (author, date, etc), but additional description as well (abstracts, section headings, keywords, etc) that makes the texts more findable.

The biggest difference here is that element sets are available for all items, while item type elements are available only to those items that belong to that item type. So, if you need a standardized set of elements that is available across all item types, an element set is the way to go.

It also seems to me that we have everything to gain by beginning our work on a data format with no particular serialization in mind. We could go from RDA to RDA-as-data and then on to RDA-as-RDF. I see some dangers in skipping the middle step, mainly that we could end up making some decisions that fit RDA into RDF but that are problematic for other serializations.

The conformance classes, algorithms, definitions, and the common underpinnings of the HTML specification.

There are various places in HTML that accept particular data types, such as dates or numbers. This section describes what the conformance criteria for content in those formats is, and how to parse them.

Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction (Floridi [2008]) adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory. The reader may wish to keep this in mind while reading this entry, where some schematic simplifications and interpretative decisions will be inevitable.

There is a first layer where we deal with libraries, their contents and services. Compare this with the accountant’s calculations and financial procedures. One may wish to develop a theory of everyday mathematics and its social practices—surely this would be a worthy and interesting study—but it seems impossible to confuse it with the study of mathematics as a formal science. The latter is a second layer. It is what LIS amounts to, what one learns, with different degrees of complexity, through the university curriculum that educates a librarian or an information specialist. There is then a third layer, in which only a minority of people is interested. We call it foundational. For mathematics, it is the philosophy of mathematics. I suggested PI for LIS. My point here is that it is important to acknowledge and respect the distinction between these three layers; otherwise one may criticize x for not delivering y when x is not there to deliver y in the first place. When checking whether the bank charged you too much for an overdraft, you are not expected to provide an analysis of the arithmetic involved in terms of Peano’s axioms. Likewise, a scientist may be happy with a clear understanding of statistics without ever wishing to enter into the philosophical debate on the foundations of probability theory. So I do not see why LIS cannot be provided with an equally theoretical approach, capable of addressing issues that the ordinary practitioner and the expert would deem too abstract to deserve attention in everyday practices.

Identity is often said to be a relation each thing bears to itself and to no other thing (e.g., Zalabardo 2000). This characterization is clearly circular ("no other thing") and paradoxical too, unless the notion of "each thing" is qualified. More satisfactory (though partial) characterizations are available and the idea that such a relation of absolute identity exists is commonplace. Some, however, deny that a relation of absolute identity exists. Identity, they say, is relative: It is possible for objects x and y to be the same F and yet not the same G, (where F and G are predicates representing kinds of things (apples, ships, passengers) rather than merely properties of things (colors, shapes)). In such a case ‘same’ cannot mean absolute identity. For example, the same person might be two different passengers, since one person may be counted twice as a passenger. If to say that x and y are the same person is to say that x and y are persons and are (absolutely) identical, and to say that x and y are different passengers is to say that x and y are passengers and are (absolutely) distinct, we have a contradiction. Others maintain that while there are such cases of "relative identity," there is also such a thing as absolute identity. According to this view, identity comes in two forms: trivial or absolute and nontrivial or relative (Gupta 1980). These maverick views present a serious challenge to the received, absolutist doctrine of identity. In the first place, cases such as the passenger/person case are more difficult to dismiss than might be supposed (but see below, §3). Secondly, the standard view of identity is troubled by many persistent puzzles and problems, some of recent and some of ancient origin. The relative identity alternative sheds considerable light on these problems even if it does not promise a resolution of them all.

Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity and the notion of vague identity. A radical position, advocated by Peter Geach, is that these debates, as usually conducted, are void for lack of a subject matter: the notion of absolute identity they presuppose has no application; there is only relative identity. Another increasingly popular view is the one advocated by Lewis: although the debates make sense they cannot genuinely be debates about identity, since there are no philosophical problems about identity. Identity is an utterly unproblematic notion. What there are, are genuine problems which can be stated using the language of identity. But since these can be restated without the language of identity they are not problems about identity. (For example, it is a puzzle, an aspect of the so-called “problem of personal identity”, whether the same person can have different bodies at different times. But this is just the puzzle whether a person can have different bodies at different times. So since it can be stated without the language of personal “identity”, it is not a problem about identity, but about personhood.) This article provides an overview of the topics indicated above, some assessment of the debates and suggestions for further reading.

The principal metaphysical questions concerning natural kinds are threefold. First, are the kinds that we think of as ’natural’ kinds genuinely natural? Second, do natural kinds have essences? Third, are natural kinds basic ontological entities or are they derived from or reducible to other entities (e.g., universals)? As regards the first question, the general problem is to determine which of the kinds to which science makes appeal, if any, correspond to real natural kinds—those existing in nature, so to speak—and which of these kinds are merely conventional—those whose boundaries are fixed by us rather than nature. As regards the second question, the problem is whether there are properties that might be essential for kind membership. Natural kind essentialists hold that natural kinds have essences (Ellis 2001, 2002, 2005). The essence of a natural kind is a property or set of properties whose possession is a necessary and sufficient condition for a particular's being a member of the kind. That fact is a "so-called" essential fact concerning the kind; it is a fact that, in Fine's terms, stems from the identity or nature of the kind (Fine 1994). Some anti-essentialists argue that there is no non-question begging way of motivating the appeal to essences (Mellor 1977). Mellor argues that the existence of essences in essentialist accounts of natural kinds is simply a gratuitous assumption. (Mellor, 1977: 309). Others use examples from the empirical sciences such as biology to argue that essentialism is too limited to capture the kinds we find in the special sciences (Dupré 1981, 1993) . In particular, essentialist accounts of kinds construe them as immutable or static, whereas examples from the natural sciences delineate mutable and dynamic kinds. Finally, even if we regard natural kinds as genuinely natural and possessing essences, the third question regarding the ontological status of natural kinds remains. One might regard natural kinds as irreducible, basic, sui generis entities (alongside, for example, particulars and universals) (Ellis 2001; Lowe 1998). Alternatively one might adopt some kind of reductionism, e.g., to universals (Armstrong 1978, 1997) or to clusters of properties (Boyd 1991, Millikan 1999).

To understand the problems and project of Aristotle's Metaphysics, it is best to begin with one of his earlier works, the Categories. Although placed by long tradition among his logical works (see the discussion in the entry on Aristotle's logic), due to its analysis of the terms that make up the propositions out of which deductive inferences are constructed, the Categories begins with a strikingly general and exhaustive account of the things there are (ta onta) — beings. According to this account, beings can be divided into ten distinct categories. (Although Aristotle never says so, it is tempting to suppose that these categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of the things there are.) They include substance, quality, quantity, and relation, among others. Of these categories of beings, it is the first, substance (ousia), to which Aristotle gives a privileged position.

Information-intensive services are being globally disaggregated as corporations respond to the pressures of increasing global competition, and take advantage of the opportunities made available by the progress of information technology and the emerging global work force. In order to globally disaggregate services, corporations must decide whether or not to carry out a service activity within the organization, and where to locate it, within or outside the geographic boundary of the home-base country. This paper analyzes the opportunities and challenges of global disaggregation of information-intensive services. Specifically, the paper proposes a taxonomy of disaggregation, and develops a theoretical framework that identifies the criteria and guidelines for successfully selecting service activities to be globally disaggregated.

"Words have a surprising number of meanings if you’re willing to go into low frequency… usages." #inls520

the amount of data that TxVia collects from every single one of its prepaid debit cards simply dwarfs the amount of data that banks collect with normal debit cards linked directly to a bank account.

"school is a time it’s OK 2 make a total mess of an ambitious project as long as it was screwed up in earnest" #inls520

This document describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked-data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organzations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.

This document defines a set of terms for describing people. It defines how to describe people's characteristics such as names or addresses and how to relate people to other things, for example to organizations or projects. For each term, guidance on the usage within a running example is provided. This document also defines mappings to widely used vocabularies to enable interoperability.

There are many situations where it would be useful to be able to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts. The Data Cube vocabulary provides a means to do this using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard. The model underpinning the Data Cube vocabulary is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), an ISO standard for exchanging and sharing statistical data and metadata among organizations. The Data Cube vocabulary is a core foundation which supports extension vocabularies to enable publication of other aspects of statistical data flows.

DCAT is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. This document defines the schema and provides examples for its use.

By using DCAT to describe datasets in data catalogs, publishers increase discoverability and enable applications easily to consume metadata from multiple catalogs. It further enables decentralized publishing of catalogs and facilitates federated dataset search across sites. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a manifest file to facilitate digital preservation.

Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs, artists or genres into Pandora and let the Music Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.

This leads in to one of the most beautiful pieces Cherry ever wrote - and one of his late-period, signature works: “Hope” (later recorded for Relativity Suite under the name “Desireless” with sax replacing the voice). A golden flurry of rippling piano chords (ala Alice Coltrane and, also, Magma’s own John Coltrane ode’ “Coltrane Sundia” from Kohntarkoz), and a yearning, wordless wail issues from Cherry. He sounds like he is bearing all the troubles of the world single-handedly, and, yet, is still willing to humble himself before us all. Spell-bindingly beautiful in its soul-baring simplicity, the tune develops into a steady-paced piano & vocal chant - a hymn to an earlier ‘age of the Ancients.’ 10 minutes of free-bliss - the flutes, and sun-drenched cymbal strokes, adjoining the groove to create pure musical manna from heaven.

When passengers travel, they are required to provide the following Secure Flight Passenger Data (SFPD) to the airline:

Name (as it appears on government-issued ID the passenger plans to use when traveling)
Date of Birth
Gender
Redress Number (if applicable)
The airline submits this information to Secure Flight, which uses it to perform watch list matching. This serves to prevent individuals on the No Fly List from boarding an aircraft and to identify individuals on the Selectee List for enhanced screening.

There's a border dispute brewing in the U.S., but it's not between with Canada or Mexico. It's a different north/south rivalry, between the Carolinas. Residents who live on the state line are upset at an effort to re-draw it. The states say they're not changing the line, just "clarifying it". But that's not how it seems to a few residents who liked the state they used to live in.

"...the conflict here isn’t between a set of actors who want the border to remain where it is and a set of actors who want to adjust the border, but between two different understandings of what it would mean for the border to remain in place."

RT @mischatuffield: This is really great news : #wikipedia #data #semweb #dbpedia #webinf #inls520

Wikipedia's category hierarchy forms a graph. It's definitely cyclic (Category:Ethology belongs to Category:Behavior, which in turn belongs to Category:Ethology).

At any rate, did you know that "Chicago Stags coaches" are a subcategory of "Natural sciences"?

All you have to do is view source on any nytimes.com article published on or after January, 23 2012. In the HTML you will see new attributes like ‘itemtype’, ‘itemprop’ and ‘itemid’. If you paste an article URL into the Google Rich Snippets tool, you can see a parse of the structured data now embedded into every nytimes.com article,

... any idea of what an instance could be?

Looking closely at http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/fr for the first
time seriously (shame on me, can't even tell since when this URI has been
available) ...
I read that it is a *rdfs:subClassOf*
http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/iso639-1_Language

Well, why isn't it an *instance* of this class?
I can see the rationale : there is not "one" French language, one can
imagine further subclasses such as Canadian French, Middle-Age French etc.
so French is a class of languages OK.
But are there any subclasses of French defined at id.loc.gov ?

And if it were the case, where do one stop the subclasses recursion and
introduce instances, if any? Is it turtles all the way down?

Only a small subset of MARC 21 fields are used in WorldCat. Even when considering the MARC fields that are heavily used in non-book formats, there are
only 21 to 30 tags that occur in 10% or more records.

Let me show you which steps have to be taken to generate a high-quality text mining application, ready to be used to annotate and to categorize any kind of text or documents covering nearly any domain. With our approach of thesaurus based text mining your documents can also be linked to the world of linked (open) data; enrich your documents with data from the LOD cloud!

This document represents a summary of the outcomes from a workshop on persistent identifiers, hosted by JISC on 3 February 2010.

Coverage of these three FRBR workset APIs. What sort of overlap is there between them? A little script worksvenn.py that takes one or more ISBNs as input, looks them up in the OpenLibrary, LibraryThing and OCLC APIs, and then outputs the resulting data with a Venn diagram using the Google Chart API.

The War of 1812 has long been a conundrum for school children and historians.  Fought due to miscommunication and to a large extent between irregular mobs, the War of 1812 has one final and irrepressible problem above all, the name does not successfully describe the conflict.

The Netflix genre taxonomy.

Culture Grid Vocabulary Bank is a joint venture between Collections Trust and Vocabulary Management Group. The bank enables users to browse, search and download a wide range of controlled vocabularies, thesauri and terminologies. There is an alerting function which provides details of changes to vocabularies in RSS and ATOM formats and a machine to machine interface accessible via a REST API.

In summary the key benefits of using Semantic Web technology for Volkswagen were as follows:

A standardised interface to data and content, accessible to developers with different skillsets, using different technologies within and without the organisation.
Separation of concerns between information and application, both logically and physically.
Increases value, reusability and accessibility of data.
Very powerful federation features.
Adoption and use didn't necessitate process or change management. It could be leveraged at any stage within the product lifecycle painlessly and gracefully, both internally and externally.

This guide to information science and technology—the product of a unique scholarly collaboration—presents a clear, concise, and approachable account of the fundamental issues, with appropriate historical background and theoretical background. Topics covered include information needs, seeking, and use; representation and organization of information; computers and networks; structured information systems; information systems applications; users' perspectives in information systems; social informatics; communication using information technologies; information policy; and the information professions.

How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability.
Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.

The book's central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville's book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life.

The Accidental Taxonomist is the most comprehensive guide available to the art and science of building information taxonomies. Heather Hedden one of today s leading writers, instructors, and consultants on indexing and taxonomy topics walks readers through the process, displaying her trademark ability to present highly technical information in straightforward, comprehensible English.
Drawing on numerous real-world examples, Hedden explains how to create terms and relationships, select taxonomy management software, design taxonomies for human versus automated indexing, manage enterprise taxonomy projects, and adapt taxonomies to various user interfaces. The result is a practical and essential guide for information professionals who need to effectively create or manage taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri.

Taxonomies are often thought to play a niche role in content-oriented knowledge management projects, as many consider them nice to have but not essential. In this groundbreaking book, Patrick Lambe illustrates how taxonomies play an integral role in helping organizations coordinate and communicate effectively. Through a series of real-world case studies, decision-making frameworks, and example questionnaires, Lambe demonstrates the wide range of ways in which taxonomies help organizations leverage and articulate their knowledge, and offers a clear description of how taxonomies relate to technology application. Accessible and jargon-free, this step-by-step guide to running a taxonomy project offers practical advice for knowledge managers and business owners alike.

Fascinating post on the complexities of music identification and #metadata: #inls520

RT @erinaleach: Hey, library metadatists! The music industry appears to need us. #inls520

Linked Data is Storytelling 101 for computers. It doesn’t have the full richness, complexity and nuance that we invest in our narratives, but it does at least help computers to fit all the bits together in meaningful ways. And if we talk nice to them, then they can apply their newly-acquired interpretative skills to the things that they’re already good at — like searching, aggregating, or generating the sorts of big pictures that enable us to explore the contexts of our stories.

Fandom aka folksonomy power-users come to Pinboard: #inls520

Has classification and knowledge organization fallen off the library profession's radar? #inls520

Interesting presentation on how EU TV archives are using #linkeddata to achieve interoperability: #inls520

4) Organize the library according to your personal principles, and browse it from arbitrary points.

This is where we need to go. Bookworm presents one set of ways for reordering the library based on the principle that language is constrained by the fields of its utterance--geographical (publication place), disciplinary (LC classification), temporal (publication year), even autobiographical (author age). The line chart that a search creates is a representation of overall trends; but it is also, taken point by point, an enormous collection of books. If you search for a term by author age and publication place, Bookworm is reordering the collection of the Open Library (a lot of it, anyway) into chunks divided by author age and place, showing you information about each one of those chunks, and inviting you to dive into a particular one to find the books matching your term.

A property right (ius in rem, real right) is an abstract legal concept which relates to an object, referred to as “thing” or “res,” or imprecisely, but commonly, “property.” This object of property is a product of legal categorisation; it may be represented by a physical thing or it can be an abstract legal creation itself, as is the case with an intellectual property right. In any event, for the law the “property-object” (whether tangible, intangible or purely intangible) is the product of a legal conceptualisation. The law (private law) creates any res or thing, whether corporeal or not, through the legal concept of real rights. That enables legal recognition of the res in question. The material object (if there is one) only becomes a res in law if real rights are attached to it. Therefore, real rights and res are both “property”, and particularly with (purely intangible) intellectual property, property rights and property objects merge into one. The abstract conceptual res typically has a reifier to make it recognisable in the material world and for the purpose of social interactions. This reifier can be a corporeal object, in which case it is a direct reifier (a table being a direct reifier and incident of a res, chattel), but, for example in case of copyright, a chattel may act not only as direct reifier of the notional personal (moveable) property right (e.g. a canvas of a painting, the score of a symphony, the paper of a manuscript), but also as an indirect reifier of the notional copyright (artistic work, musical work, literary work). The chattel in question represents directly the personal/moveable property (but does not constitute it, because the res remains a legal concept), and, in addition, the chattel represents indirectly the copyright in the work which is expressed and recorded in the chattel in question (a painting, sculpture etc.).

This Article initiates an account of things in the law, including both conceptual things and material things. Human relationships matter to the design of law. Yet things matter too. To an increasing extent, and particularly via the advent of digital technology, those relationships are not only considered ex post by the law but are designed into things, ex ante, by their producers. This development has a number of important dimensions. Some are familiar, such as the reification of conceptual things as material things, so that computer software is treated as a good. Others are new, such as the characterization of material things as conceptual things, so that digital goods become licensable. The regulatory consequences of the thing are increasingly built into the construction of the thing. These developments appear to be poised to envelop things beyond the digital sphere. It may no longer be apt to divide the world cleanly into conceptual and material objects. Things combine features of both. As a result, they can no longer be viewed solely as passive backgrounds against which relation-based legal analysis unfolds. To ensure that society maintains the ability to regulate as broadly as it deems legitimate, law must account for the creation and design of the things that increasingly dominate developments across a variety of legal domains, from intellectual property law to antitrust law to commercial law. The Article describes how things exercise the authority that characterizes classic legal regulation, and it reviews the different mechanisms that legal institutions have used to recognize and differentiate things. Understanding those mechanisms is a step toward appreciating the nature of the regulatory landscape in which both legal institutions and individuals exist.

Free your metadata! #inls520

How to assign metadata to communications from the dead? #inls520

This paper looks at the reality of implementation of e-commerce standards in the book and journal supply chains, and at where the barriers are to more widespread implementation. It compares this with the situation in other media, and looks at some of the challenges of convergence and divergence. Although the challenges identified are considerable, it finishes by discussing why there may be reasons for optimism about the future.

Standardization is a poorly understood discipline in practice. While there are excellent studies of standardization as an economic phenomenon, or as technical a phenomenon, or as a policy initiative, most of these are ex post facto and written from a dispassionate academic view. They are of little help to practitioners who actually are using and creating standards. The person actually creating the standards is working in an area of imperfect knowledge, high economic incentives, changing relationships, and often, short-range planning. The ostensible failure of a standard has to be examined not so much from the focus of whether the standard or specification was written or even implemented (the usual metric), but rather from the viewpoint of whether the participants achieved their goals from their participation in the standardization process. To achieve this, various examples are used to illustrate how expectations from a standardization process may vary, so that what is perceived as a market failure may very well be a signal success for some of the participants. The paper is experientially, not empirically based, and relies on my observations as an empowered, embedded, and occasionally neutral observer in the Information Technology standardization arena. Because of my background, the paper does have a focus on computing standards, rather than publishing standards. However, from what I have observed, the lessons learned apply equally to all standardization activities, from heavy machinery to quality to publishing. Standards names may vary; human nature doesn’t.

On the difficulties of description and levels of abstraction: #inls520

Good post on the merits and weaknesses of XML: #inls520

I just added a definition for #inls520 at

Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli is releasing a new book on The Art of Clean Up, where he takes everyday scenes of disorder and rearranges them into neat rows, sorted by different attributes such as color, size, shape, and type, etc.

Discover what hashtags really mean, and add your own definitions in seconds.

From a Stanford Libraries newsletter: "Linked Data could provide the antidote to the chaos and complexity of the current overabundant array of too simple search mechanisms with too little precision and too short recall of relevant results."

Survey of classificatory principles from bibliographic, philosophical, biological, psychological, and linguistic perspectives. Challenges to traditional principles from the cognitive sciences and their implementations for bibliographic classification.

The ConceptWiki is a universal open access repository of editable concepts.

Survey (2011) about: - time of using controlled vocabularies - preferred knowledge models - main application areas - importance of standards - benefit of Linked (Open) Data - trends in branches - trends in organizations sizes.

This course comprises a critical, comparative examination of the concept of description and its institutionalization, in the form of metadata standards, rules, and formats, in three primary contexts: libraries, archives, and museums. We will investigate the conceptual foundations and goals of description in each context and the structures (guidelines, technologies) that have been developed to facilitate institutional goals. We will also explore emerging challenges to traditional models of description, including new forms of complex, dynamic entities (for example, continually updated documents, such as blogs), new technologies for searching, browsing, and describing (such as user-generated descriptive tags), and new ways of viewing the descriptive enterprise (via critical theory, for example).

The course will not emphasize the practice of creating descriptive metadata in any current environment (that is, you will not learn how to create library catalog records or archival finding aids according to existing content and technical standards). Instead, the course will focus on understanding and interrogating the conceptual foundations of existing standards and guidelines for such descriptions. We will emphasize rigorous and spirited analysis of these descriptive paradigms and their continued utility in a rapidly changing information landscape.

For meaningful information exchange or integration, providers and consumers need compatible semantics between source and target systems. It is widely recognized that achieving this semantic integration is very costly. Nearly all the published research concerns how system integrators can discover and exploit semantic knowledge in order to better share data among the systems they already have. This research is very important, but to make the greatest impact, we must go beyond after- the-fact semantic integration among existing systems, to actively guiding semantic choices in new ontologies and systems – e.g., what concepts should be used as descriptive vocabularies for existing data, or as definitions for newly built systems. The goal is to ease data sharing for both new and old systems, to ensure that needed data is actually collected, and to maximize over time the business value of an enterprise's information systems.

In a previous question answering study, we identified nine semantic-relationship types, including synonyms, hypernyms, word chains, and holonyms, that exist between terms in Text Retrieval Conference queries and those in their supporting sentences in the Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence (Graff, 2002) corpus. The most frequently occurring relationship type was the hypernym (e.g., Katherine Hepburn is an actress). The aim of the present work, therefore, was to develop a method for determining a person's occupation from syntactic data in a text corpus. First, in the P-System, we compared predicate–argument data involving a proper name for different occupations using Okapi's BM25 weighting algorithm. When classifying actors and using sufficiently frequent names, an accuracy of 0.955 was attained. For evaluation purposes, we also implemented a standard apposition-based classifier (A-System). This performs well, but only if a particular name happens to appear in apposition with the corresponding occupation. Last, we created a hybrid (H-System) which combines the strengths of P with those of A. Using data with a minimum of 100 predicate–argument pairs, H performed best with an overall lenient accuracy of 0.750 while A and P scored 0.615 and 0.656, respectively. We therefore conclude that a hybrid approach combining information from different sources is the best way to predict occupations.

If you want to be able to sort information by various classification schemes, such as by most popular, or by role, or by problem, your content has to be chunked in a granular enough way to facilitate the various means of sorting.

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935.

Thanks to @samruby for a fascinating presentation to #inls520 about the messy business of #standards development! #sils

The Chicago Underground Library is a new model for open, location-specific archiving of independent and small press media. We are always seeking books, magazines, zines, journals, broadsides, newspapers, and art books of all types, genres, and print runs from the Chicago area. (And maybe your city, too. Be patient, or ask us how to start your own.)

We accept everything from the area (ever), regardless of perceived quality or importance in order to create a detailed index from which connections among the publications will emerge.

Keeping records of everyone who contributed to a work, as well as keywording every subject, allows us to map the evolution (historically and contemporaneously) of Chicago’s communities and movements and encourage the production of new media by providing context, inspiration, and programming designed to support collaboration.

Incommensurability & information organization: #inls520

The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) has released linked data sets through its North Atlantic Population Project and Integrated Public Use Microdata System, making them readily accessible to researchers. Before the availability of complete-count census microdata from the MPC, researchers applied various forms of record-linking software. This article describes the techniques used in the MPC's linking program and briefly compares this technique with those used by other researchers. The key feature of the MPC linking method is the construction of cumulative name-similarity scores, based on approximately 2.5 billion record comparisons; it also uses support vector mechanics to classify potential links. In this article, the authors explain modifications made for the final linked data sets and include a discussion of the role of weighting variables when using linked data.

Standardizing name strings before searching for links is common practice during record linkage and is generally believed to increase the size and quality of linked data sets. In this article, the authors quantify the impact of name standardization on historical record linkage, using data from nineteenth-century censuses of the United States and Norway as test cases.

While it is possible to represent immensely complex structures using topic maps, the basic concepts of the model — Topics, Associations, and Occurrences (TAO) — are easily grasped. This paper provides a non-technical introduction to these and other concepts (the IFS and BUTS of topic maps), relating them to things that are familiar to all of us from the realms of publishing and information management, and attempting to convey some idea of the uses to which topic maps will be put in the future.

A story about the Semantic Web.

If we treat each lettered heading in the Library of Congress Catalog as a single, long text, we can ask the computer to find similar genres based on word usage.