ConFigures

Tagging, ontology, and structured information

Paper magazines seem to pile up unread at home. I’m better at keeping up with online news/research. I can tag and point others to online sources, after all. I’ve been considering letting my ACM* membership lapse for a while, at least partly due to guilt over unread Communications of the ACM issues (though I keep up with the tech alerts they email me pretty well). However, I did notice that their October issue has an article on Knowledge Management, specifically, “Knowledge Services of the Semantic Web“. I actually went to the trouble of finding and linking to an online version of it (and tear out the paper version and hung it outside my cube for any interested colleagues). From my reading, it’s an exploration of what sort of infrastructure might facilitate knowledge commerce (the trading of knowledge services, not just within an enterprise), with some specific proposals (mostly, what ontologies, but also a bit about registration entities and payment schemes). It’s interesting to think about how knowledge commerce may develop.

Some of their search examples suggested a tagging solution to me. However, there’s no saying that random taggers will be interested in adding the sort of metadata that leads to commerce or facilitates the kind of use an organization may wish to make of its data. I can see why an organization might wish to encourage certain kinds of contributions through structured fields and other input mechanisms. This approach comes with its own risks, of course. Whatever they set up may become outdated quickly if their system/mechanism is not very flexible. What’s more, the more that inputting seems like “work”, the less enthused people will be about adding metadata. This may be just fine if what’s wanted is really just the experts/authorities adding metadata (not the hoi polloi), and there are enough of them, and they’re motivated, of course. I think mashups between social software and structured information resources have a lot of potential, depending on the implementation and the critical mass. Where things get tricky is when folks have different expectations about the interactions, as in my recent post about LibraryThing. Tim, the founder of LT, wrote a very thoughtful comment, and I’ve been meaning to reply to it at length; this ACM article has helped me sort out my thoughts a bit, preparatory to that (next entry, I hope).

* By the way, I was cheered to notice that someone at ACM appears to have seen/taken seriously the feedback about their beta site. Not just my feedback, I imagine, but anyway, I’m glad their post-beta implementation went in the direction I’d hoped.