Semantic community tagging for ‘power users’

One thing which concerned us for some time in Newcastle was the ‘interface’ or possible relationships for users and staff between contextualities built by folksonomy and those more formal structures built by domain experts such as curators.  We’re not at the answers stage yet I think, apart from an agreement that both approaches are valuable and can complement each other. Maybe its simplistic but I like to see the ‘formal’ side acting as semantic glue sticking folksonomies together.

Things are moving along elsewhere. DBin looks interesting: http://dbin.org/ RDF semantic tagging of discussions by domain experts. Danny Ayres (Raw) has been blogging about SWAP 2006 in Pisa and this among other things, raised his interest.

Mike

3D vs 2D and the richness of folksonomies

In Brighton I briefly stumbled through an attempted explanation of something I think may be worth expanding on. The context was discussion of the relative values of curatorial and folksonomic terms, and what I wanted to get at was (a) terms for describing what you’re looking at may not be the same as you would use if searching for the same thing, in part because (b) what you describe when you’re looking at something varies according to how you see it: whether it’s in front of you, 3D and full size (or not), or on a screen in 2D (and most likely shrunk). The 2D/3D thing was explored in a presentation at MCN by Elise Lewis and I’ll snip my notes from the conference here (so please excuse the note-like nature):

Lewis (U
North Texas) – user interactions with 3D objects on the web

No common definition of “3D image”; lots of viewers, functionalities and needs. Lots of research in e.g. games and commerce but not in cultural heritage. Did a pilot study with savvy grad students. Their descriptions of 3D images from Arius* were mapped to hierarchical levels of perception:

• colour
• shape
• texture
• object – name, generic description
• action
• location – in this case used to describe the location on the object (view). In 2D, a geographical term
• affect

Descriptions also on 2D versions of same item. More description on 3D, especially action, object, colour and location. Occasionally more terms used for texture in 2D that 3D but descriptions are much richer in 3D as more facets emerge. Need a survey to find out how and why these images are being used.

As such objects become more common metadata and controlled vocabulary issues (e.g. for location) will become more urgent. Will user generated content be helpful or not? There will be management issues too – MD, systems, retrieval.

* Arius is a company who work with Royal Ontario Museum, they’ve done some cool colour laser scanning stuff for them

Curators inevitably get to see stuff in 3D, and quite possibly bigger, too, so it follows from the above that quite aside from being more “academic”, their descriptions may also be much richer simply because of their interface with the item in meatspace. Which is not to say that they should always be present, let alone privileged above other terms used for an item.

Jeremy O

More reading

I said I’d get a reference to one or two people, which is Laurie Hunter’s chapter in the new DCC Digital Curation Manual, which you can find here: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters/intangible-asset/. It’s the closest thing I’ve read to a strategy for making the business case for SW in museums, and in fact the approach he adopts can be applied to a lot that museums engage in – so perhaps it’s already being used. Some of the specific modifications to the “balanced scorecard” that he and others from Glasgow propose can also be brought over to our area of concern, despite being intended for his particular scenario of digital preservation. Have a look; it’s good to read an economists take on how we should make the case to the accountants and decision-makers that it’s worth investing cash and effort in something that won’t cause gold sovereigns to rain down from above.

Secondly, a suggestion for those who have access to a decent library before we head to Newcastle: Allison Littlejohn’s “Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to eLearning” (Kogan Page, ISBN 0-7494-3950-5) is full of interesting chapters. If I get time I will try to post precis of a couple of the most relevant. Unsurprisingly, the solutions that might help to solve sustainability in online learning can have a lot of overlap with SW. I’ve just come across this commentary, too http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2003/1/JIME-2003-1.html which includes introductory chapters together with summaries of the other chapters. I’d better read it myself, now!

 Jeremy O

Brighton SWTT Workshop – The Day After

24 Hour Museum’s HQ in Brighton was the scene of a packed, bustling, productive meeting of the Semantic Web Thinktank project. A full report of the proceedings will appear here as soon as possible, but here’s a picture that captures the mood of the meeting. Ross Parry is in full flow talking to Frances Lloyd-Baynes of the V&A in front of one of his famous diagrams.

Next meeting is in Newcastle on December 19 – watch this space for more news and an agenda for that meeting, plus the Brighton meeting report.

Meeting reports are generated from an audio transcript of the meeting – that means someone trawling through hours of talks and trying to get down the essence of the ideas presented. If you were at the meeting and think we’ve missed something, please add it to the blog and we’ll make sure it gets in the report. We really need this collection of documentation of the meetings to build into something meaningful – so it’s key you add to the group knowledge by posting.

Jon Pratty, December 1 2006