Blogorroico, elucubrazioni quotidiane discovers XFML
Blogorroico, elucubrazioni quotidiane discovers XFML
the Information Awareness Office: "Suppose
the Information Awareness Office: "Suppose you're devising a logo for a new wing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an office charged with developing intelligence tools and integrating the government's existing surveillance networks. Suppose that it has a vaguely sinister name - say, the Information Awareness Office - and that it's to be run by a former Iran-contra conspirator. What would your design be?" (via afongen)
Ha'aretz: "It does not bother
Ha'aretz: "It does not bother Rosalind Duke that some people regard her lifetime's work as "one of the most boring things they can think of." [...] "Almost every book brings its own problems and needs," she says when explaining why she finds the cataloging process so engaging. "They are like people in that sense." [...] Take [Dutch philosopher] Spinoza, she says. "All over the world he's known as Benedict, but he's entered in our catalog as Baruch [his Hebrew name], so there is a cross-reference to Benedict, Benedictus and Benedict de. There's a particular book, Opera Posthuma from 1677, and on its title page [the author's name] is simply written `B. d. S.' The cataloger is going to have to do some work on that - they might think it's Spinoza, but they have to verify it and find the publisher."
End User's Corner - March
End User's Corner - March 1998: "So, was Ranganathan a Yahoo!? Perhaps it's a matter of semantics. Considering his complex notation scheme developed for the Colon Classification, as well as his principles of facet analysis as applied to the organization of digital information, I would say yes." What I want to know is: what have librarians been doing since then? Is faceted classification as good as it gets from the librarian corner?
Excerpts from Ranganathan's Prolegomena to
Excerpts from Ranganathan's Prolegomena to Library Classification: "These are some definitions and principles taken from S.R. Ranganathan's Prolegomena to Library Classification (2e) (1957). The terminology isn't easy to crack without some examples, but just keep in mind that he's talking about how classification schemes like the Dewey and Library of Congress systems work. They organize knowledge (in books and other things) by deciding what the book is about and then giving it a call number and putting it in order with other books. How that aboutness is decided, to what level of detail, and how the call numbers are made, is what he's discussing. He's setting out the basic rules he thinks all classification schemes should use."
Scripting News: "So, is your
Scripting News: "So, is your brain really hierarchic? I think it is. Here's the informal demo."
No, the brain doesn't think in hierarchies. Categories in the human mind aren't organised in hierarchies. That's why hierarchical taxonomies ultimately always fail: we don't think that way, and the world definitely doesn't work that way (and even if it did it wouldn't matter since we still wouldn't think that way). That's how I understand George Lakoff anyway.
Pixelcharmer with faceted classification!
Browse Tanya's pixelcharmer weblog at FacetMap, using the facets "process", "topic", "format" and "date". Very cool. Tanya implemented an XFML export in Moveabletype and imported that in Facetmap.
XFMLManager: authoring hierarchical faceted classification:
XFMLManager: authoring hierarchical faceted classification: "XFMLManager is a free authoring tool for hierarchical, faceted metadata. We will also host the upcoming Hierarchical Faceted Metadata Authoring Experiment."
IBM flushes restroom patent: "IBM
IBM flushes restroom patent: "IBM has quietly eliminated a patent it received on a method for determining who gets to use the bathroom next."
XFML Libraries: "XFML libraries are
XFML Libraries: "XFML libraries are existing libraries with facets and topics you can easily copy when creating a new XFML file." Starting with an IPTC library.
ContextualAnalysis - Indexing Using Faceted
ContextualAnalysis - Indexing Using Faceted Classification: "No matter what your style of indexing, no matter what software you own, no matter whether you're a full- or part-time indexer, be you in-house or freelancer, you may find that using facets as an aid to indexing can help you produce better, more consistent indexes."
TRANSLATE.org.za: "South Africa has eleven
TRANSLATE.org.za: "South Africa has eleven official languages - an indication of cultural and language diversity of our nation. Yet most computer software is only available in one language (English) and is poorly supported in another language (Afrikaans), the other 9 languages have no translation. The translation project of translate.org.za plans to address this by coordinating, initiating, sustaining and focusing the efforts of South African translation teams. This project aims to give learners, pensioners and all citizens of South Africa access to computers in their mother tongue. "
A proposal for a general
A proposal for a general Syndication Subscription Service: no more searching for XFML buttons and pasting URL's in your newsreader.
Origin of the abbreviation i18n
Origin of the abbreviation i18n for internationalization: "A DEC employee named Scherpenhuizen was given an email account of S12n by a system administrator, since his name was too long to be an account name. Apparently, this approach to abbreviating long names was humorous and was generalized at DEC. The convention was applied to "internationalization" at DEC. Apparently it passed to Apple quickly. Both companies were using the term by 1985."
Facetmap of iaslash - ia/:
Facetmap of iaslash - ia/: "[...] I think the main thing people want to see, however, is Peter's application that will help individuals map topics on disparate systems. Playing with this makes me realize I need to go through the old posts and clasify them." On its way :)
Bliss Classification Association - Bibliographic
Bliss Classification Association - Bibliographic Classification Guide: "The standard categories recognised in "classical" facet analysis are: Thing - kind - part - property - material - process - operation - patient - product - by-product - agent - space - time".
Why do these people try to specify what facets are useful? Surely if I want to classifcy my content using a facet called "How impressed I was with this content when I first saw it" then that is a perfectly valid facet? This underlying assumption that there are "generic" or "correct" ways of categorizing the world is just, well, wrong. The world doesn't have an "inherent" classification that we just have to discover. All classification gets its meaning from the people using it, not from the objects being classified.
Puton your Forrest Gump accent:
Puton your Forrest Gump accent: A wiki is like a huge communal garden. Brilliant metaphor.
The IACommonplaceBook: "Commonplace Book is
The IACommonplaceBook: "Commonplace Book is an old idea that deserves remembering; a single place where we keep bits and pieces of language, knowledge, ideas that we run across."
BBC NEWS | Technology |
BBC NEWS | Technology | E-mail makes surfers emotional: "People can feel a greater connection to commercial organisations that send them regular newsletters, which in turn means more loyalty, the research found." Based on Nielsen research as described in his latest Alert box: "[...] users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality." Also includes a juicy quote as usual: "From an interaction design perspective, [...] Macintosh is a higher-priced dolled-up variant of Windows".
This focus on emotions seems to fit in the NNGroups' newfound appreciation of beauty and pleasure, an emotional reaction.
I'm not sure about the appropriatness of their methodology (they call it themselves "subjective comments") to find out what people want/need in email newsletters - but then again I can't evaluate their methods without downloading the report (is that info even in there?). More interesting would be ethnographic-style research of how users really use email newsletters, how it fits in their general information-usage patterns and what it means to them. It seems like the NNGroups is stretching the classic usability test beyond its capabilities instead of adapting other, more appropriate techniques.
Interesting interface for browsing hierarchical
Interesting interface for browsing hierarchical faceted metadata: Knowledge Processors (Bad site - you need to dig through a bit to get to the good stuff)
The iaslash FacetMap is lovely:
The iaslash FacetMap is lovely: combine format and topic to find information on IASlash (viewed through Facetmap using the Iaslash XFML export)
Boxes and Arrows: Ranganathan for
Boxes and Arrows: Ranganathan for IAs: an excellent history lesson about the father of faceted classification.
More questions from information architects.
More questions from information architects.
Microsoft Tackles Enterprise Content Management:
Microsoft Tackles Enterprise Content Management: MS's CMS Server (used to be NCompass) seems to have grown up and is now a serious contender, especially because of it's focus on ease of integration and productivity.
Trying to explain XFML concepts,
Trying to explain XFML concepts, I have made a dodgy cartoon, a generic overview that won't really help anyone and a comparison with other technologies. The implementation checklist may actually be useful. (All at the XFML wiki)
I had never seen Microsoft
I had never seen Microsoft Clippy (at microsoft.com!): "My name is Clippy, and Office XP has me sweating (and rusting). Why? Because Office XP works so easily that it's made Office Assistants like me useless. Obsolete. And, I'm told, hideously unattractive."
The company I used to
The company I used to work for went into liquidation. But you wouldn't say so from looking at their homepage.
Game Studies 0102: Cultural framing
Game Studies 0102: Cultural framing of computer/video games. By Kurt Squire: "In the United States, and increasingly in Europe, games such as Doom or Quake have garnered a disproportionate share of attention in the press, as they have become pawns in a culture war waged by cultural conservatives. As many gamers, critics, media scholars, and social researchers agree, this discussion has been devoid of any serious study of games."
Measuring Information Architecture Panel at
Measuring Information Architecture Panel at CHI 2001:
"They almost never credibly analyze their implementations.
[...]
However, with the rise of interaction design and information architecture, and the overt intention of delighting end users even while making their lives easier, the design community has continued their push into the experience domain. Over decades, without a credible basis for defining or measuring the whole of human experience, they have garnered an astounding quantity of successes.
One could conclude that success in this domain requires only the ability to innovate or to follow strategically, and the ability to deliver user-perceptible value. Which is another view of science: that quantification merely follows, but that science (especially the social sciences) proceeds through innovation and serendipity in theory and application, and by the delivery of ultimate value. Decided:
Abandon quantification; and may the fittest win."
Evaluating systems after they have been built is important, but is almost never done. It is a business problem: it isn't being done because it's hard to sell. The main value of developing a business model where you can sell that research-after-the-fact lies in the increased experience it creates for the implementors: they can then find mistakes faster and thus learn from them faster.
Digital Web Magazine: "The primary
Digital Web Magazine: "The primary problem of user-centered design is that people engage in it at the expense of all else. Oftentimes, what is *most* useful, usable, and meaningful to the end-user is untenable from a business perspective, and the product, while maybe popular, is a financial failure. Additionally, UCD can often get bogged down in process, in needing to verify every design choice with users, unnecessarily encumbering progress."
What does XFML look like?
An attempt to describe what XFML looks like.
First, you have to create some metadata that will be exported as XFML. You can use your usual content management interface for that - most cms systems have some type of metadata creation ability. This is what it looks like in Moveabletype:
Note that there is more metadata available in MT, generated by the system itself: amount of comments for example, or date of publication.
Another possible interface for creating metadata comes from an authoring application still under development:
Next you have to assign metadata to webpages. With MT, that looks like this:
With our under-development-being metadata authoring application, it currently looks like this:
So now you have a bunch of topics and pages that you assigned topics to. You are ready to export an XFML file. You should add a template (how to do that in MT) or use the capabilities of the cms to export XFML (here's the XFML module for Drupal). On your website, you can put a button that looks like this:
It links to your exported XFML feed. Look at it in your browser, it looks like this:
Now things get funky. You now have an XFML feed available, that you can import into other applications. For example, if you import the above XFML file in Facetmap, you get this lovely browsing experience of this weblog:
An alternative view: an earlier version of that file imported in bpallen technologies' Teapot server product:
It even gets funkier once reusing other people's indexing becomes possible with new applications. But more on that later - meanwhile some more reading: here's an overview of software that currently supports XFML.
Also check out the XFML wiki.
p i x e l
p i x e l v i e w - behind the screen with Carrie Bickner: "I think about markup the way a more traditional librarian would think about the manufacturer of a printed book. I look for well-produced structural markup the way my print-world counter part would look for acid-free paper and a good binding. Library materials, whatever format, need to be preserved. If they are built well, they will last."
The 1 Percent Solution?: "Four
The 1 Percent Solution?: "Four major online publishers: a renowned pure-play content site, two major newspapers with very successful free sites, and one of the world's major financial dailies. Each has great marketing and promotional power. Each spent 4 to 18 months trying to convert users into paying subscribers for traditional content. Each converted no more than 1 percent." (Via Webword)
I'm very satisfied with cloudmark
I'm very satisfied with cloudmark so I keep plugging it: it has blocked about 95% of all spam. Very easy to use as well, and the beta can be downloaded free (some problems have been reported but I never experienced any of these)
Matt Mower's Knowledge Log: "Whilst
Matt Mower's Knowledge Log: "Whilst XTM and XFML do have many similarities (and theoretically you could represent any XFML document using XTM -- I think [note: Yes indeed]) they are different.
XTM was designed to be a generalized format for representing arbitrary topic relationships. The upshot is that XTM, whilst expressive, is relatively complicated. XFML is more focused and so, IMO, easier to get going with. XTM can support arbitrary, complex, relationships among topics. XFML supports fewer simpler relationships. Don't go getting the idea that XFML is inferior though.
One of XFML's guiding principles is that it be focused and easy to implement. In this I think it succeeds admirably. The spec is only about 8 or 9 pages long. [...]"
dive into mark: "RSS 0.9x
dive into mark: "RSS 0.9x and 2.0 are the Whoopee Cushion and Joy Buzzer of syndication formats. For anyone who has tried to accomplish anything serious with metadata, it's pretty obvious that of the various implementations of a worldwide syndication format, we have the worst one possible. - Except, of course, for all the others."
RDF Interest Group IRC Scratchpad:
RDF Interest Group IRC Scratchpad: "dajobe: XFML looks like aiming for an 'RSS 1.0' sweet-spot of simplifying things for a particular purpose."
Indeed.
Tanya knows me :) Is
Tanya knows me :) Is there a way to automatically import people who know me into my FOAF file?
XFML template
I wrote template to publish an XFML feed. It still could do with some additional MT wizardry, but it works.
Step 1. Create a new index file in your MT admin screen. Set your output file to xfml.xml Copy the text of this text file into the template.
Step 2. Rebuild and check if the generated file displays as valid XML.
Step 3. Add an XFML button and a link tag to your main template.
Step 4. Save your XFML file on your computer, go to Facetmap and import it. Behold.
Another teaser image of the
Another teaser image of the metadata authoring tool I'm playing with. Interface-wise, I'm going for ugly but efficient. I'll worry about looks later. When playing around and building a metadata map, I realised I needed a way to easily manipulate topics in all facets really quickly - the following interface allows for that, without resorting to fancy DHTML that I wouldn't be able to program anyway. The stars indicate parentage - just add a star to make a child topic. You can type "delete" after a topic and it gets deleted. Type "facet [22]" after a topic and it gets moved to another facet. Ugly but fast.
This is exactly the sort
This is exactly the sort of thing an upcoming metadata authoring tool I've been working on will make a lot easier: indexing other people's content. Once you have good tools for indexing, and a format for sharing the data, a lot of things become possible. I've been writing a taxonomy and indexing some information architecture sites with the beta of the tool, and I can't wait until it's finished, because that will mean other people will index too. And I'll be able to tap in to these other indexing efforts. Boy!