Pitfall of Search

Art vs. Information Science, Ryan Tracey, eLearn Magazine (Dec 30, 2010)

The pitfall of search is that the search box makes us think we can see and access everything but it fact it's hardly the size of a mail slot on a door.



When we search we are like Ned Kelly on a horse looking at the horizon seeing only a tiny slice.

Ryan Tracey reflects on the Ted Canberra lecture by Dr Whitelaw who recommends we deal with this problem by showing everything through data visualization techniques. He notes that this may be good for exploring but not necessarily for learning. The learner needs "scaffolding" - a structure to the subject area. This can be provided through "categories and tags". Taxonomies, essentially - and taxonomies built by subject experts. He says (and I agree wholeheartedly), "I still believe in the value of an expert guiding a novice. I maintain the expert has an obligation to contribute his or her expertise to the knowledge repository, and to tag it appropriately."

Article also links to the excellent TedXCanberra lecture.

Promoting Faceted Navigation

Faceted Navigation: Grouping – An UnTapped Potential?, James Kalback, Experiencing Information (Dec 6)

Apparently the many people still need to be persuaded of the value of faceted organization of results. Kalback describes the merits of facets for improving relevance for the user and refers to Marti Hearst work in the 1990s at Xeroc PARC

The advantage is in the groupings - "The theory is, structuring a results list by clustering items around a topic better reveals “aboutness” of subsets of items, and this in turn potentially increases the chance of relevance. This isn’t only true in academic settings: studies show that grouping results can be of significant benefit in broader contexts on the web. ]"

Gives the World Digital Library as an example of a site that is applying a faceted construction.

Software for Creating A Taxonomy

Software for Taxonomy Creation and Management by Heather Hedden, FUMSI (Nov 2010)

FUMSI readers are fortunate to have Heather Hedden, author of Accidental Taxonomist, as guest writer at FUMSI. Here she offers a clear and simple guide of software you can use to create taxonomies - whether small where a spreadsheet can serve, to the other extreme of sophisticated large-system thesaurus systems.

Conclusion: "Choice of software should depend on your platform/system architecture, number and location of users, auto-classification needs, import/export capabilities or plug-ins, and the need to integrate with other business software systems."

Primer on semantics

Semantics in Practice - a primer from Enterprise Search Center (Dec 7)

Semantics - the idea of extracting meaning by analyzing words - is still being much considered to improve search, and soon the art of delivering the right advertisement. This article lays out many of the basics.

Today, a search engine (Bing is given as an example), can interpret our query and deliver a suite of information on travel queries such as a hotel.

"To achieve that vision, producers of content needed to add metadata to information resources. It was critical that data standards and ontologies—that is, formalized vocabularies of terms—were agreed upon so that anyone putting data onto the web could agree that “revenue” in one database was the same as “revenue” in another. There are a number of techniques for doing this, and the applicability of each depends on the complexity and flexibility required by a specific application."

Article gives several current examples and names products and companies.