Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Mail on the Google Box?

Posted on by David

a klog apart raised an interesting idea recently related to Google launching their own e-mail service: a combined blogger, gmail and google search appliance.

Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

That sounds like a powerful combination for a corporate intranet.

The Quality of Your Indexers Matters

Posted on by David

Came across these 12-year old stats recently:

Bad news I think…

1. If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.

2. Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.

3. The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.

4. Experts’ judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.

[Source: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409]

I think that just goes to show that the quality and knowledge of your indexers (human or otherwise) is incredibly important.

Blogging Session Feedback

Posted on by David

This week I received the results of attendee evaluations from the blogging session we did back at the beginning of the month. (A copy of our slides are posted on the wiki page.) We had about 10 people on site attendees plus another 16 call-ins. The conference calls could have had multiple people on the line, so at a minimum we had 26 listening/attending.

Overall, the attendees rated the session a 4.3 out of 5.

People seemed to like the general introduction we gave as well as the case study of how we have deployed a weblog network at ASHA.

The most commonly requested change for the program was to provide more balanced coverage of external and internal uses of weblogs. In the session we spent about 10 minutes on external use in response to attendee requests. 50/50 on external/internal use would be a great program and probably be more attractive to wider audience. The main reason we didn’t have more on external use by an association is that I haven’t deployed an external blog yet for our assocation and so don’t have any direct experience to share yet.

Klogging Event

Posted on by David

I’ll be presenting, along with Glen Engel-Cox, an ASAE Knowledge Network titled “Blogging for Associations” on January 8, 2004. The session will cover how associations can set up a weblog network on their intranet as a low-cost knowledge sharing tool.

To support this session and some other stuff I’m working on, I’ve set up a wiki. You can see the page for the blogging session here and the main wiki home page here. I’ve restricted pages that I want to maintain control over but most of the site is editable. Feel free to add links to the resources pages if you would like to add information for the session attendees to see.

Semantic Blogging Research

Posted on by David

HP has been conducting research into fusing structured metadata into weblogs. They also have a demonstration blog set up to see their ideas in action. (Found via Open Access News.)

Semantic blogging exploits this same personal publishing, syndication, aggregation and subscription model but applies it to structured items with richer metadata data. The metadata would include classification of the items into one or more topic ontologies, semantic links between items (“supports”, “refutes”, “extends” etc.) as well as less formal annotations and ratings. There are several ways this more structured data could extend the power of blogging:

Discovery. At present is it not easy to discover either a channel of interest (e.g. “I would like to find blog channels about the semantic web”) or a collection of specific items of interest (e.g. “Are there any more blog entries describing this application idea?”).

Cross-linking. Current blogs support a single link between the channel record and the blogged item. By extending this mechanism to support linking between items (using a property hierarchy) we can create a network of topic interconnections that supports more flexible navigation. These links can themselves form part of the disseminated content – for example to represent the structure or scholarly discourse.

Flexible aggregation and selection. The current blog subscription mechanisms are in some ways both too fine (being bounded by the individual blogger’s channel of posts) and too coarse (e.g. I might like Ian’s technology channel but am only interested in the semantic web bits). The richer categorization and structure of semantic blog channels would make it easier for users to create virtual blog channels which aggregate across multiple bloggers but select from that aggregate according to other criteria such as topic (or community rating).

Integration with other sources and applications. The structured nature of semantic blog channels makes it possible to develop automated blog robots that can process and enhance the blogged items. For example, in the bibliography domain transducers would enable import and export via existing bibliography schemas like BibTex and automatic linking to large repositories such as CiteSeer.

There are lots of differing opinions as to whether the semantic web can actually be achieved. It’s good to see some actual research being done to shed some more light on this issue. As I’ve said before, I think metadata can still be useful in discrete communities and/or collections where there is some control and incentive to code accurately. I don’t think it will likely work for the web as whole given the web community’s tendency to game systems. A semantic blog network could be quite interesting for a community of researchers.