Bill Gates at the NVTC Breakfast Forum

I got the opportunity to attend the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) breakfast this morning, in DC at the Capitol Hilton. The speaker was Bill Gates. You know, that Microsoft guy? It was kind of cool to be a couple of hundred feet away from the richest man in the world (or maybe second now that Warren Buffet's star has been rising). Bill spoke at length on the direction computing is headed and mentioned everything from surface computing (your desk working for you?) to intention recognition through visualization. Very cool stuff, though I think I'll make sure I stay dressed in front of the PC-CAM.

And, I am fascinated by the concepts of surface interfaces -- as an active sailor, I'm envisioning a future sailboat that has a surface navigation computer that ties together mapping/charting, GPS, depth sounding (and underwater 3-D profiling), routing and guidance, with timely updates on chart data from the NOAA Notices to Mariners, coupled with a finger-driven interface similar to what Apple now uses on their iPods and iPhones (oh, wait, that's not from Microsoft).

But, I have to say, I was not "wow-ed" by Bill Gates' talk. I've heard him speak before and it's pretty much the same spiel I heard 20 years ago at a Microsoft CD-ROM Multimedia conference -- better human interaction with machines.

There were a couple of questions from the audience after the talk, and one questioner pounced on Microsoft for considering security as an afterthought (hear-hear). But my real disappointment is that Bill Gates' vision did not account for any of the real-world problems we seem to be facing: global warming, rising energy costs, environmental issues and so on. Where is computing really going to be in 20 years if, as Al Gore is suggesting, sea level has risen enough to flood some of our coastal cities? Or if we can no longer tolerate the environmental impact of hardware disposal?

So, I throw out a challenge: "What will computing look like in an age where we have higher sea levels, unaffordable energy, and intolerable environmental issues". Bill?

Folksonomies Applied

In a previous blog entry, I was starting to think about folksonomies as they might apply to content management. Having lots of experience in topical classification, therauri, and related tools, I figured this would be a simple discussion, but it isn't.

What is a Folksonomy? "Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary" (Wikipedia).

By their nature, folksonomies are created by the people. I think the key to a successful folksonomy is participation by many people -- we make up for the lack of a controlled, standardized vocabulary and it's application to content by sheer volume and enthusiasm from a wide-spread using community. In fact, complaints about this approach usually center around the imprecise nature of the tagging. Since users typically apply tags to content, the tags are often ambiguous, overly personalised and inexact. But, Guy and Tonkin make a persuasive argument that user applied tags are in fact converging -- that the overall universe of applied tags is becoming self-limiting. If so, then the universe of tags that are being created in services like Flikr and Del.icio.us are becoming useful bases for classifications.

And in other, related developments, these services are beginning to categorize their tags. Especially at Del.icio.us where there are now classification tags and action tags, among others. To me these seem like we gray-beards call facets.

But that's not really my point, though I think it is important. I think we need some tools that can work with content management to allow tagging, maybe even super tagging, wherein the tags are members of controlled facets. This isn't really hard. Virtually every content management system "knows" about content by a URI. And there are some very cool features in the Del.icio.us service, including keeping my bookmarks and tags private, and retrieving them via an API later. So, we can set a bookmark in Del.icio.us containing the URI of the content we want to tag with the tags we want for that content.

I tried this very simply by registering at Del.icio.us, turning on the "private bookmarks" setting, and putting the Del.icio.us buttons on my browser toolbar. Then I pointed my browser at a content item in a CMS (Alfresco) and clicked the Del.icio.us "Tag" button. Added tags and saved it. I can see the tags and the URIs in my items on the Del.icio.us website.

But, to actually use this information, we need to pull the tags and content URIs back out of Del.icio.us. XML to the rescue. Or, rather, XML and the Del.icio.us API. We can fetch the tags we're using by using this URL: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/tags/get. We can also see all of our content using this URL: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get. And we can retrieve by tag: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get?tag=C

Pretty cool stuff.

Library Takes 'Talking Books' Digital, Washington Post, March 5, 2008

I love this article in the Washington Post. For a couple of reasons. First, I have several friends who are legally blind (which I think is different from "illegally blind"). These kinds of tools help them enormously. It makes me feel like, as a society, we're doing the right things at least sometimes.

But, and perhaps more importantly, I'm thrilled to see this because WE DEVELOPED IT. That's right folks, the excellent programming staff at Retrieval Systems (who pay me) wrote the underlying software for the digital talking book for the Library of Congress, National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS). So this makes us proud.

We've been doing work in the background for the blind community for many years. Mostly this has involved library data exchange. For both NLS and the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D) we wrote bunches of code to help them exchange bibliographic records, supporting creation of a union catalog so that blind patrons could more readily find books. And for NLS we've also developed some production tools to help in the creation of digital talking books.

But the DTB player is something of which we're especially proud. Not only was it technically challenging, it was socially responsive.

A New Kind of Content Management

I've been enamored with classification of content through my entire career (which is certainly long enough). Early on, I was working on library automation systems and in particular with Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) data and I always thought classification of documents and other content types was a panacea we should try to achieve. Librarians used these and other tools as finding aids to locating specific information, usually books.

Along came the internet and the amount of information available grew exponentially. Search engines provide keyword access to text-base content. Publishing was redefined to include anyone putting information out on the internet. Published content became a thing to be managed with buzzwords like single-sourcing, XML, multimedia, syndication, blogs, Wikis, and so on.

Well, the world is very different now and with everything from books and documentation to audio and video as well as thought streams all published on the web, finding a particular bit of information can be a nightmare. Even traditional textual content is hard to find in the vast archive that is the internet.

So how do we find things now? What are our modern finding aids starting to look like?

Some very cool new technologies have come along recently: folksonomies and mashups, to name two.

Folksonomies in particular offer a new approach to an old problem -- how to capture the "aboutness" of content. Classifying content is an age-old process that has spawned many fields including taxonomies and indexing. These, in turn, have created an arcane set of rules and procedures wherein the maintenance of the indexes or thesauri become big efforts on their own -- at times larger than the content management effort they are supporting.

Mashups are a cool way to combine content from multiple sources into a single presentation. Kind of like federated search and portals in a social-networking environment.

I'll be exploring these more over the next several posts.