From the ACM TechNews Summary

Social tagging can help people find educational resources in digital repositories that are filled with millions of learning materials, says Open University of the Netherlands PhD candidate Riina Vuorikari. She says that adding free, non-hierarchical keywords to the digital learning materials would bring self organization, flexibility, and robustness to learning resources portals. The user, item, and tag allow for more cross references between content from heterogeneous repositories, which can enable users to discover more learning resources across language, country, curriculum, repository, and other contexts. Moreover, future applications for learning resources should make better use of social recommendation systems that work in multiple languages, which is especially relevant to Europe, Vuorikari says.

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Source: AlphaGalileo

A few weeks ago we posted about a new prototype from the New York Times named “Custom Feeds.” It allows users, for free, to create “custom built” RSS feeds of NY Times content that make use of the actual tags (aka descriptors, subject headings) that humans use when meta-tagging (aka indexing). At the end of the post we even made special note that The Times took the time to point out they still uses human “meta-taggers.”

Today, the wonderful Tara Calashain has an excellent post about how The NY Times making all of the their controlled vocabulary (subject headings) available to the public. Eventually 30,000 of them will be available. As of today, approximately 5,000 personal name headings (aka tags) are online.

Tara also points out that each of the 5,000 names have direct links to RDF and XML data at DBPedia* and Freebase. She also explains that you can download the complete file of names (something a developer is likely to do) or browse and view each recrord one at a time.

Given that we’re not developers we’re going to browse them (in HTML format) online. You can view the 5000 names here. Just like the LC Authorities file has reference value by sometimes providing birthdates, when a name was first used, or a snippet about a heading the NY Times files do much the same thing.

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From the Article:

Expanding its Semantic Web technology stack, the W3C (World Wide Consortium ) announced this week a standard to bridge knowledge organization systems like classifications, thesauri, and taxonomies to linked data.

The Semantic Web is intended to make it easier to search for relevant documents and information on the Web. With the W3C SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) standard, enterprises, social networking applications, government portals, and others managing large collections of items, such as books, news reports, and blog entries, can leverage linked data capabilities. SKOS provides a model for expressing basic structure and content of concepts, such as thesauri, subject heading lists, and taxonomies. Different communities can use SKOS to link vocabularies to the Semantic Web.

Source: InfoWorld

From the Blog Post:

In many respects, the most important question for the library world in examining semantic web technologies is whether librarians can successfully transform their expertise in working with metadata into expertise in working with ontologies or models of knowledge. Whereas traditional library metadata has always been focused on helping humans find and make use of information, semantic web ontologies are focused on helping machines find and make use of information. Traditional library metadata is meant to be seen and acted on by humans, and as such has always been an uncomfortable match with relational database technology. Semantic web ontologies, in contrast, are meant to make metadata meaningful and actionable for machines.

Source: go to hellman
Hat Tip and Commentary: eFoundations

Two new briefing docs from UKOLN.

+ An Introduction to Tags and Tagging

+ What Makes A Good Tag?

Source: UKOLN

From the Abstract:

Historically, the notational system of the Dewey Decimal Classification provided for non-institution-specific, relative location shelf arrangements, thus substantially reducing bibliographic classification effort. Today its decimal notation continues to provide the classification scheme with flexible granularity, is hospitable to expansion, expresses relationships, interfaces well with modern retrieval systems, and is internationally understood.

Access the Complete Paper by Rebecca Green (9 pages; PDF)

Source: Proceedings 2009 North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization Vol. 2 (via DLIST)

Those with an interest in cataloging, metadata, and information organization might find this article worth a look.

From the Article:

Think it’s impossible to truly harmonize data from multiple countries, given the variations in barcodes, brand names, packages, products and sizes involved? While meeting the challenges of global data differences is daunting, it can be accomplished with a unique combination of local data access, global understanding and a design and implementation plan that delivers action-oriented applications.

Source: Nielsen