Evolution of the Web to Web 3.0

Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English (Presentations) from Digital Inspiration (May 2009)

This is brilliant - Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 explained in a single slide of points, some text, and 5 excellent slide presentations. As the note on the page explains, the two about the red stamp describe the semantic aspects and workings very clearly.

Good Look at Semantic Web

Jean Graef of the Montague Institute answers the question, Where will semantic content come from? in terms we can begin to understand.

"Semantic web" is usually a very theoretical idea of linking up data in magical ways. In this posting, we get a real-life example drawn from a mortgage refinance application of how a semantic infrastructure would work.

Also raised here is the matter of trust. How will we know to trust the information that is brought together through a semantic infrastructure?

Jean Graef concludes: "The technology piece of the infrastructure is almost ready; it's the semantic content and editorial oversight that's missing.

Card Sorting with Users

Holger Maassen has the inside track on card sorting. In this posting on Card Sorting Maassen describes using card sorting as a categorization technique with user groups in order to learn more about how they view and work with information.

"Card sorting is a categorization technique where users sort cards describing and giving their picture, their understanding and their mental picture of concepts, workflows and information and knowledge."

But, he notes, card sorting will not deliver a finished taxonomy.

He presented this as the first of a series on design and analysis techniques for improving user experience.

ASIST on Information Architecture

BULLETIN of the American Society for Information Science and Technology for August / September 2009 [pdf] is a special issue about Information Architecture.

Contents:

+ A Tonic for the Busy Troops by Stacy Merrill Surla, Guest Editor
+ The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles,
Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) by Christian Crumlish
+ The Debut of Usable, Influential Content by Colleen Jones
+ An Internet Watered Down by John Pettengill
+ Gaming the Design: Using Game Design Techniques in the Realm of Investing by Kellie Rae Carter and Dominic La Cava
+ IA for the Rest of the World by Miles Rochford
+ Lessons from Slime Mold: How to Survive and Thrive in Ever-Changing Organizational Environments by Kate Rutter

+ A Reflection on the Structure and Process of the Web of Data by Marko A. Rodriguez

From the editor:

"Our annual special section on information architecture (IA) – A Tonic for the Busy Troops – is the centerpiece of this issue and a very fine one. Stacy Surla, our associate editor for IA, has put together a collection selected from presentations at
the 2009 IA Summit.As they were coming in, I was already emailing friends saying that a number of the articles were going to be must-reads. Immediate utility and impact were Stacy’s selection criteria, and she certainly implemented them well: lots of very timely information for practitioners and some fine thought-pieces. Stacy’s introduction says it all in terms of what’s there and why. Don’t miss it.

Our feature article is another one not to miss. Marko Rodriguez writes about theWeb of Data – the RDF (Resource Description Framework) side of the web – and the problems of exploiting it.Whether you are an RDF novice or someone for whom RDF is daily fare, Marko’s ideas and insights will intrigue you. It’s an outstanding contribution."

Hakia's Commercial Ontology

A New Commercial Ontology from hakia by Dr. Riza C Berkan, Hakia (

CEO of Hakia, Dr Riza Berkan, proposes a Commercial Ontology that will serve the types of queries that users put to the web. Berkan says these have a "commercial pattern", but I suppose we could think of it as consumer interest just as easily. The key bit is -- "One particular distinction of the commercial pattern is that they come in short packages including a name (onomasticon), or always referring to something sold, bought, watched, heard, etc." Commercial Ontology will also work with sequence of words - which may be more efficient than individual terms.


Also see hakia Unveils Commercial Ontology, Search Engine Watch (July 30)

Introduction to Metadata - Online

Introduction to Metadata (online book)

Stephen Downes has an entry about a free online book about metadata - and provides a short review that finds the first three chapters comprehensive, but the treatment of "rights metadata" poor.

Nonetheless, worth looking at.

Introduction to Metadata. Version 3.0, edited by Murtha Baca. "An online publication devoted to metadata, its types and uses, and how it can improve access to digital resources." Published by Getty.edu.

Interesting note: "Reader's Note: The editor and authors of this publication are aware that the noun "metadata" (like the noun "data") is plural and, therefore, should take a plural verb form. However, in order to avoid awkward locutions, it has been treated here throughout as singular."

Contents:

Home
Introduction
Setting the Stage
Metadata and the Web
Crosswalks, Metadata Harvesting, Federated Searching, Metasearching
Rights Metadata Made Simple
Practical Principles for Metadata Creation and Maintenance
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Contributors

Web 3.0 a matter of restructuring

Web 3.0: The Next Step for the Internet by Michael Baumann, Information Today (May 2009) via Allbusiness.com

Web 3.0, says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, is going to be about restructuring the web.

"Web 3.0 will usher in a revolution in the construction of the internet itself. In the third decade of the Web, the focus is going back to the back end and we're focusing on upgrading the infrastructure of the Web again."

"When an application sees a page on the Web today it doesn't really know what to do with it," Spivack says. "But as we add more of this open standard metadata to the Web, it makes the Web machine understandable. Also, as applications get smarter because they can understand language and know what words mean, that also adds meaning and structure to the Web."

Resources for Thesaurus Construction

A posting in Buslib-L titled 'Summary of responses re thesaurus for records management purposes' (July 22) gives us a good starter list of resources for constructing thesauri. Thanks to Sarah Knight



Thesaurus Construction and Publishing Solutions
http://www.multites.com/index.htm
Provides software. Also has a list of Resources for Thesaurus Construction.


Taxonomy Warehouse (Factiva)
List of all vocabularies: http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/querybyvoc_search_include.asp

"Taxonomy Warehouse was created in 2001 as a valuable community resource, available free to users and vocabulary publishers to help organizations maximize their information assets and break through today’s information overload."


Index New Zealand Thesaurus
http://innz.natlib.govt.nz/content/thesaurus/index.htm

"The Index New Zealand Thesaurus has been designed to describe journal and newspaper articles about New Zealand and the South Pacific in the areas of social sciences and humanities. This version was released in November 2005 and contains over 1,200 preferred terms."



Australian Governments' Interactive Functions Thesaurus (AGIFT)
http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/create-capture-describe/describe/agift/agift-zip.aspx

"The Australian Governments’ Interactive Functions Thesaurus (AGIFT) is a three-level hierarchical thesaurus that describes the business functions carried out across Commonwealth, state and local governments in Australia. It contains 25 high-level functions, each with second and third level terms, as well as non-preferred terms and related terms. A scope note describes the range of activities covered by a preferred term and provides cross-references."


Victoria Online Thesaurus (July 2008)
Department of Innovation, Industry, and Regional Development
http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/index.php?env=-innews/detail:m2110-1-1-8-s-0:n-9-1-0--

"The Victoria Online Thesaurus is a subject thesaurus of descriptive terms that reflect the themes and resources within Victoria Online (VO), the Victorian Government’s online portal. Victoria Online is a metadata-driven gateway to Victorian State, Federal and Local government information. The VO Thesaurus has been developed to populate the Keyword (DC.Subject) field within the VO Metadata Application Profile (VOMAP)."


Health Thesaurus - Health and Ageing Thesaurus
Australia - Department of Health and Ageing
http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/Publishing.nsf/Content/health-thesaurus.htm

"The Health and Ageing Thesaurus is a living working tool which assists consistency and subject retrieval of health and ageing concepts. By standardising concepts to one single subject heading, the Thesaurus forms the basis for a common terminology within the Department.

MeSH (medical Subject Headings) produced by the US National Library of Medicine has been used as the basis of the medical terms and the corresponding hierarchical schedules in the Health and Ageing Thesaurus. We are very grateful for their permission to use MeSH in this way. For this edition 2004 MeSH has been used."


National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities
http://nccs.urban.org/classification/NTEE.cfm

The NTEE-CC classification system is used by the IRS and NCCS to classify US nonprofit organizations. It divides the universe of nonprofit organizations into 26 major groups under 10 broad categories.


Google Book Search: Can use Google Book Search to find thesaurus - combine that term with others related to organizations, fund raising, charity etc.


TIPS: Taxonomies in the Public Sector
Taxonomies and thesauri: a list of references and resources for public
sector applications (Great Britain)
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/Bibliography2005-05-11.pdf

"This bibliography has been prepared for the Taxonomies in the Public Sector (TIPS), a discussion group which supports the Metadata Working Group by encouraging information professionals in the public sector to meet and develop guidance on the implementation of taxonomies and metadata. While IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) and its predecessors GCL and LGCL are the main focus, public sector applications commonly use a complementary specialised vocabulary in tandem with IPSV. the bibliography gives background references across the gamut from development to exploitation and sharing the outputs"


United Nations Bibliographical Information System Thesaurus
http://unhq-appspub-01.un.org/LIB/DHLUNBISThesaurus.nsf

Entries are in six languages.


UNESCO Thesaurus
http://www2.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/

"The UNESCO Thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation which includes subject terms for the following areas of knowledge: education, science, culture, social and human sciences, information and communication, and politics, law and economics. It also includes the names of countries and groupings of countries: political, economic, geographic, ethnic and religious, and linguistic groupings."


International Labour Organisation (ILO) Thesaurus
http://www.ilo.org//thesaurus/defaulten.asp

Can use the rotated index to get a sense of the categories and content.

Structure First

The Perfect Search By Penny Crosman, Intelligent Enterprise (March 1, 2006 )

Overview article on the importance of structuring content to improve findability of information in an enterprise.

"Google-style search is all right for some, but greater accuracy in the enterprise demands a mix of techniques including content tagging and taxonomy development and technologies such as entity, concept and sentiment extraction tools."

Text Mining for Meaning

Many are pointing to the emergence of a Web 3.0 that brings together Web 2.0 collaborative qualities with a semantic web of connections and semantic tools for understanding.

Nstein, the digital publishing technologies company, held a webinar titled From Metadata to Meaning: Intelligence in the Semantic Era on June 25, 2009, moderated by Diane Burley.

Seth Grimes of Alta Plana presented the case of an exploding digital universe where individuals are creating 70% of the content. Search based on keyword matching won't be sufficient. The next generation of tools must make sense of the data to deliver meaningful answers. Text mining combined with semantic analysis is one direction. Google has some new capability at picking out data and its context - eg the employment data for a US state. Newssift from the Financial Times shows more capability at identifying organizations, places, people and topical themes in its aggregation of news. Grimes noted that semantically enriched content, linked data, context sensitivity, and location awareness are now recurring themes. Text mining / analytics is enabling Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web.

For designers and users this means:

• Automated content categorization and classification.
• Text augmentation: metadata generation, content tagging.
• Information extraction to databases.
• Exploratory analysis and visualization.

Jean-Michel Texier, Chief Technology Officer at Nstein Technologies, described Nstein modules for mining and analyzing data - essentially to make sense of vast stores of text by extracting concepts, identifying and normalizing entities, categorizing content, extracting relevant sentences, analyzing sentiment, and finding similar content.

The presentation is available in PDF on the dowload section of the Nstein website: http://www.nstein.com/en/downloads.php?sourceId=236 - registration required.