Peter Van Dijck's homepage

I used the FOAF-a-matic to

I used the FOAF-a-matic to generate this FOAF file of myself.

# Oct 7, 2002

I added "Month of publishing"

I added "Month of publishing" as a new facet to the XFML feed of this weblog (I will publish the template when XFML goes live). "Author" would make another nice facet.

# Oct 7, 2002

I just realised this older article of mine describes the problems that faceted classification quite nicely solves. It's not particularly clear (like my thinking at the time; I knew I'd found a problem but couldn't describe it very well), but what a title! Lost in the Matrix

# Oct 7, 2002

Seb: Personal knowledge publishing and

Seb: Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. "I've tried to make it serious-looking enough for academics, yet straightforward and engaging enough for non-academics. It's been a delicate balancing act and I have mixed feelings over the results."

# Oct 7, 2002

I'm trying to find different

I'm trying to find different methapors and ways of explaining faceted classification. "It lets you triangulate when searching" seems to work well. The "It's like a diamond, you can look at things through different facets" seems less convincing.

Seb's Open Research: "faceted classification consists in choosing several attributes ("facets") and classifying things under particular combinations of values for these attributes. The appeal of this scheme is its combinatorial power that lets it automagically make room for things that don't exist yet."

# Oct 7, 2002

Tanya points out Seb's Open

Tanya points out Seb's Open Research categorizes people funnily.

# Oct 7, 2002

IAwiki: ContentSilos: a nice overview.

IAwiki: ContentSilos: a nice overview. Surely, there must be something postive about silo-ing your content? Anyone?

# Oct 7, 2002

Iaslash has a whole heap

Iaslash has a whole heap of new features, including an XFML feed. Funky!

# Oct 6, 2002

Bookslut Issue Six

# Oct 4, 2002

Yum! SIMS 202 Information Organization

Yum! SIMS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval: the Berkeley course on Information Organisation is probably one of the best in the world. Answers questions like "What is information?", "How much is there in the world" and more. Talks about faceted classification, metadata in search, implementation issues and such. I'm gonna be spending some time on these :)

# Oct 4, 2002

Mo' Faceted Classification

Faceted classification is quietly taking off. Here's a quick overview of some implementations.

The original browsing tool for faceted classification was Flamenco, a research project at Berkeley university, which happens to also be the home of much of the more interesting research on how humans categorize the world (think Lakoff). But anyway.

Further research is being done in universities, often focussing on trying to implement a system using faceted classification for access to information. Facet project at University of Glamorgan for example. Or FATMKS at UCL.

Commercial implementations exist as well: bpallen (responsive engineers) and Endeca (hidden behind an almost inpenetrable wall of marketeese) both provide systems for browsing information with FC. They don't seem much better than the Flamenco system, interface-wise, though.

In a category of its own we have Facetmap: it's interface is excellent and evolves fast. Facetmap is the work of one man.

Faceted classification (FC) is also being taught. This homework paper (PDF) is an excellent tutorial for FC in itself - check it out. Really. If you're still confused, here's an excellent Berkeley slideshow onclassification systems. More papers are yours if you keep digging: Experiences with a Faceted Classification Scheme in a Large Reusable Software Library (in short: faceted classification alone isn't enough). But we were talking about implementations.

I believe implementations will quickly reach an acceptable level of maturity. The interesting bit comes when real life experiences start coming back, and when easy availability of tools allows more experimenting. I think faceted classification theory will have to become more rich, and that richness will come from the experiences with interfaces. And not just browsing interfaces, creating faceted metadata (or any kind of metadata really) is a huge challenge, and tools can really help there as well. And then distributed metadata. Anyway, my point is: tool availability is coming, and that's good because that will allow us to experiment and then refine the theory. I'm gonna shut up now.

# Oct 4, 2002

I'm re-reading "Women, Fire and

I'm re-reading "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things", and came across this discussion on Re: Basic Level Categories. Linguistics is one of the most interesting fields around - I'm also trying to follow a linguistics course my girlfriend is taking, and it already changed many of my preconceptions. (Such as that of a dialect not being as valuable as the official language somehow.)
As for basic level categories, I'm sure the insights gained from the research around categories can be useful for information architects.
Yum. Slideshow on categorisation at Berkerly. Berkeley teacher papers. Finding the Flow in Web Search. (pdf)

# Oct 4, 2002

Quick preview of some XFML

Quick preview of some XFML software we are working on: this screen pops up after clicking a bookmarklet and lets you assign topics to the page you were on.
XFML manager screenshot

# Oct 4, 2002

The metaphors of interviewing

gladwell on the metaphors of interviewing: "Not surprisingly, interview specialists have found it extraordinarily difficult to persuade most employers to adopt the structured interview. It just doesn't feel right. For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date. We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. The structured interview, by contrast, seems to offer only the dry logic and practicality of an arranged marriage. "

# Oct 4, 2002

the Less-Than-Perfect User, including a

the Less-Than-Perfect User, including a picture of the Perfect User many people tend to design for. Nice!

# Oct 4, 2002

XFML preview

XFML: xml format for shared, faceted taxonomy of metadata: XFML Core is finally available for public preview. Click the purple button at the top of this page for an example XFML feed. It still needs some work: I want to find a way to not display entries with no metadata assigned in MT. Any tips?

# Oct 4, 2002

You have to like a

You have to like a spec that has a bunch of flowers as its "symbol".

# Oct 3, 2002

A year ago I wrote

A year ago I wrote the poorbuthappy guide to war. How could I have known things would only get worse?

# Oct 3, 2002

JOHO the Blog: "At least

JOHO the Blog: "At least this opens up a new alternative power source: attach generators to the Founding Fathers as they spin in their graves."

# Oct 3, 2002

Visualising large projects. (Tufte, via

Visualising large projects. (Tufte, via Bblog)

# Oct 3, 2002

Eric Scheid asks: A question:

Eric Scheid asks: A question: is there a implementation used to define the canonical
URI for a given document, ie. it's preferred permalink?

# Oct 3, 2002

TrackBack at Mac OS X

TrackBack at Mac OS X Conference: a page collecting blog postings about the conference. Promising, but it still seems too complex...

# Oct 3, 2002

The difficulty of categorization: "I

The difficulty of categorization: "I also wonder whether classification experts simply cultivate the perception that classification is extremely difficult. Even manual classification can be done quickly, if my experience with professional indexers is any indicator. It's not unusual for a professional indexer to generate a comprehensive, high-quality back-of-the-book index for a new title in less than three weeks."

# Oct 2, 2002

The business requirements for classifying

The business requirements for classifying content

# Oct 2, 2002

Faceted classification of information: a

Faceted classification of information: a pretty good overview.

# Oct 2, 2002

Gadget-lust strikes.

# Oct 2, 2002

High Context: "The power of

High Context: "The power of facets".

# Oct 2, 2002

Seb's Open Research: lessons learnt

Seb's Open Research: lessons learnt when implementing blogs in large organisations (I really can't bring myself to call them "K-logs"). :"Posting the information is a small problem. Organizing and retrieving it is a big problem. " Ah! XFML!

I foresee a future (auch! I just said that!) wherein tools for organising information (using metadata) are as available as weblogging tools, and people will build these "maps" and publish them. Some people will turn out to be great indexers, some bad ones. The good ones will be popular, since the metadata is published in an XML format, and can be reused on other websites. That's the dream XFML is trying to be one little step towards, in the same way RSS was a little step towards more effective weblogging.

# Oct 2, 2002

Now that I have some

Now that I have some time to kill I keep stumbling over interesting blogs: andersja's blog is a nice example.

# Oct 2, 2002

dive into mark: "One year

dive into mark: "One year ago today, my (now former) manager told me to shut down my weblog and remove all traces of it from my server. He tried to convince me that the Internet was too small to mix the professional and the personal. One year ago today, I gave him my answer, and the rest is history. Today, to celebrate this anniversary, I would like everyone to read my resumé, admire this full-screen picture of my cat, and link to this post."

# Oct 2, 2002

I have started using Feedreader

I have started using Feedreader
to read RSS feeds. It's pretty good, very nice and simple interface. Radio Userland on the other hand, has an interface that just makes me cry. The blogging/cms tool is good (what you see in your browser), but the Radio tool itself is totally techie-centric. Under tools>my pictures for example you have 2 menu options: "open data" and "refresh code". I hope Radio 10 will have a user friendly interface, because there is definitely potential there.

# Oct 2, 2002

So is Listening the number

So is Listening the number one skill of the information architect? I think so.

# Oct 2, 2002

Online story-telling: a real life

Online story-telling: a real life thriller: 1934 - 2002 ... Het Lam Gods en de Rechtvaardige Rechters (in Dutch) is a website by a retired taxi-driver who is slowly revealing the secret of one of the most famous art-robberies of the 20th century.

A painting was stolen and never found - the site promises to reveal the location of the stolen painting which is according to ransom letters by the thief "in a public place", so the thief couldn't retrieve it "without attracting public attention". The site is breaking all (Belgian) traffic records - and international coverage is starting to happen. Just wait till they get /.ted. It all feels like reality TV - but for real.

# Oct 2, 2002

No Iraq Attack: An Open

No Iraq Attack: An Open Letter from the academic community opposing a U.S. invasion of Iraq

# Oct 2, 2002

The Shifted Librarian: "A little

The Shifted Librarian: "A little realized fact outside of libraryland is that we're completely beholden to our database vendors. For the most part, we can't build our own software for running library catalogs, mainly because of a lack of money, time, resources, and programmer librarians. So we have to rely on the handful of vendors that make the software that runs our catalogs. Naturally, these vendors don't really play nicely together, and it's a very drawn-out process to switch from one vendor to another so it's relatively rare." Ah, that explains a lot.

# Oct 2, 2002

Bitzi: a kind of distributed

Bitzi: a kind of distributed metatagging effort for all types of files - seems focussed on adding metadata to P2P filesharing.

# Oct 1, 2002

Being in Belgium for a

Being in Belgium for a short while, I get to see the news here again. The first person ever took advantage of a sensible law making euthanasia possible in certain cases. Doctors are starting to use marihuana for pain control purposes with cancer patients - "the effect is not like when you smoke a joint" was reported. A UN research project ranks Belgium the 4th best country in the world to live in (the USA is nowhere up there). And the German speaking part of Belgium (70.000 people! Their own parliament! Their own official language!) are called "the best protected minority in the world". Things are ok in Belgium.

# Oct 1, 2002