Information Research Weblog

It would undoubtedly have been better if I had not made a number of spelling mistakes in a post extolling the virtues of bottom up expertise!

;-)

Euan




-----Original Message-----
From: Euan Semple-DIGILAB
Sent: Sun 2/27/2005 8:05 PM
To: irweblog.irweblog
Cc:
Subject: RE: IR-WEBLOG Semantic Weblogging.

Msg URL: http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/522
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The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes there is rubbish on the web but the availibility of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn't have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by "conventional" means.

There were naysayers then, and indeed there still are, but would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallable than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

Yours respectfully

Euan


-----Original Message-----
From: Wallace Koehler [mailto:wkoehler@valdosta.edu]
Sent: Sun 2/27/2005 7:27 PM
To: irweblog.irweblog
Cc:
Subject: RE: IR-WEBLOG Semantic Weblogging.

Msg URL: http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/521
--------------------------------------

I agree with Tom. I have argued much the same elsewhere. The problem(s)
with any free text system -- whether one is asking authors/editors to
provide keywords or to undertake an extensive xml markup is the very
free nature of the process. The process lacks any modicum of the use of
controlled vocabulary. In order to generate anything approaching
relevant retrieval, one would need to have access to multilingual
thesauri well in excess of what the EU, for example, has produced.

Second, any cataloging/indexing scheme left to author discretion runs
the risk of assumptions, time constraints, etc. In order to capture
full semantic meaning using automated mark-up systems, I suspect all
terms would have to indexed together with the aforementioned thesauri.

Thus as Tom suggests not only are we in need of technical models, we
need also consider economic models.

Finally, I question the very exercise. Given the highly fluid nature of
the WWW, what are the implications for any mark up system when the
underlying native document may be changed virtually at the will of its
creator?

Wallace Koehler


Tom Wilson wrote:


>Msg URL: http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/520
>--------------------------------------
>
>I've always been a little dubious about the prospects for the 'semantic
Web', since it seemed that a great deal of effort was needed to prepare
the material to be used in such a Web. The whole thrust of development
in information retrieval, for example, has been to reduce the effort on
input and to put the load on the user to discriminate among the items
output from the search algorithm. Consequently indexing and
classification disappeared, to be replaced by free-text retrieval. The
semantic Web idea asks organizations to reverse this process - to put
more effort into the input side of the process in order to enjoy more
benefits from the output side.
>
>One can see why it has happened: with the original developments in IR
all one got from the output phase was a list of references that might
or might not satisfy your needs. To discover what was actually useful
you had to trek off to the library and locate the items, peruse them
and make a final decision. With the emergence of digital information
systems, this is no longer necessary-and, in many cases, no longer
possible, since the library no longer stocks the physical objects you
want to examine. More sophisticated output systems are needed
therefore, to replace the element of browsing among selected items to
discover what is useful-the electronic world demands higher levels of
probability that something will be useful in order that the user is not
frustrated by the volume of output.
>
>Will organizations be prepared to pay for the effort, however? This was
the original problem: intellectual analysis of subject content requires
human intellects, and in highly specialised domains these will tend to
be very expensive intellects. So, whatever the intellectual case for
the semantic Web, an economic case will be needed and I haven't seen
anything of the kind so far-although I don't go looking much, so it may
be there.
>
>These thoughts were prompted by a paper in the December 2004 issue of
Communications of the ACM
<http://portal.acm.org.lib.costello.pub.hb.se/citation.cfm?id=1035134.10
35164&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&idx=1035134&part=periodical&WantType=periodical&ti
tle=Communications%20of%20the%20ACM&CFID=39553071&CFTOKEN=40220118> on
"Semantic blogging and decentralized knowledge management" by Hewlett
Packard scientist Steve Cayzer. His paper and his Weblog
<http://www.semanticblogging.org/blojsom-hp/blog/> and Website
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/steve_cayzer/semblog.htm> and the
associated material are very interesting, but they also reveal that
putting an entry into a semantic Weblog will take more effort than this
entry in my Weblog. Of course, it's information management... :-).
>
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>

------------------------------
Wallace Koehler, PhD
Director/ Assoc Professor
MLIS Program VSU
Voice 229 333 5860
Fax 229 259 5055
http://books.valdosta.edu/mlis
wkoehler@valdosta.edu


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