Taxonomies 3.0 report announced in ‘Inside Knowledge’

Taxonomy specialist Jan Wyllie, author of one of Ark Group’s biggest-selling special reports, is writing an updated report intended for publication before the end of the year. IK interviewed him about his reasons for bringing out a Third Edition.

What’s new since the old report that makes it worth writing a follow-up?

The report, which was written four years ago, does include sections on folksonomies and tagging over the new user made Web of blogs and wikis which was at the beginning of what is now called Web 2.0. Now the millions who use the new free media of Web 2.0 just assign any descriptive words which come to mind, and hope to remember them, and that other people whom they would like to see their stuff will happen to use the same words.

As Web 2.0 platforms migrate from the open internet enthusiasts to the worlds of business and government, the issue of information management will become a company-wide problem, rather than the problem which information professionals and taxonomists are paid to solve. Everyone will start tagging and chaos is liable to result.

Yet we know that taxonomies, especially faceted classification, add considerable meaning and value to the information retrieval experience. They help people turn information, whether in the form of text, sound or video ‘out there’ into practical knowledge ‘in here’.

The purpose of the Third Edition will be to make an understanding of how and why to use taxonomies as part of an information management strategy available to the growing number of casual taggers, both inside and outside corporations, whose knowledge acquisition experience is being impoverished by the unnecessary confusion, information overload and chaos that ensues after random tagging.

Will it be all-new material or simply additional or re-written chapters?

My belief, backed up by the positive feedback on the first and second editions, is that one of the report’s strengths is its organization. So I aim to keep the chapters, but will update and rewrite them. I will also posit new Scenarios at the end, in addition to evaluating how the existing Scenarios fared in the light of the future. I will, of course, also be including a collection of recent finds in the ‘What the Experts say’, key quotation boxes.

Although the core methodologies mentioned do not change, contexts do and experience increases. The whole issue of how best to integrate tagging and taxonomies will be fully addressed, rather than mentioned in passing. Indeed, it is the issue I want to raise in my article next month.

Like methodologies, taxonomy and thesaurus software functionality and techniques actually change very slowly. However, marketing strategies and companies do change, all too frequently. The Technology chapter will have to be overhauled.

Since prospective readers of the report are less likely to be exclusively information management specialists, I will strive to make it as readable and as interesting to read as possible for a general audience.

When do you intend to complete the new report?

The plan is to publish in the autumn.

Why should anyone with the old report(s) buy this new one?

The new report will put taxonomies and the management issues which they raise into the new Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 business context. It is important for readers of the old report to see where their departments fit in, and to fit the new technologies and practices into their existing business environment. I predict that customer relations will be an area of special interest.

Also as the new blogs, wikis. podcasts, and videocasts make information management a near universal concern, people outside the KM world will need to be informed and to learn. It is because more people need to know this stuff that the price will be considerably less than what Arkgroup charged for the first two editions. The exact price will be announced nearer the publication date.

Metaclip: Watch out! Indications of imminent economic reversal

Metaclip, April – May 2007: All the articles in the Economy category, clipped by Trend Monitor 2.0 from Clipmarks , are suggesting that the global economy is teetering on the brink of a serious, perhaps un-precedented reversal. Consumers and corporates are up to their eyes in debt, and hedge funds are described as nearing the exploding point. The US housing market is deflating faster than ever before, while the stock market is described as a “Dead Man Walking”.

Consumers: Consumers are portayed as “taking a break” on spending as major US retailers reported April sales which were described as “the worst on record”.

Housing: With home sales estimated by the US National Association of Realtors to have suffered their biggest drop in nearly two decades, Robert Shiller, the Yale Economist who predicted the Internet bubble, is cited in ‘The Financial Times’ warning of a housing bubble “to match the Internet bubble”. He says UK and Spanish house prices are twice as over valued as in the US.

Trade: The US trade deficit is reported reaching a six month high on May 11, while China’s trade surplus is said to have doubled in March continuing a two year accelerating trend with its main trading partners, the US and Europe.

Markets: Companies are reported re-purchasing shares in un-precedented numbers boosting sharing prices, but setting the stage for “coming tsunami” of equity supply. The cost of borrowing is expected to increase, which will add to “the swollen ranks of lowly-rated firms that are up to their necks in debt” which will have to sell shares — as well as various other assets — as a matter of survival, often regardless of price. Meanwhile, Warren Buffet calls the $1.6 trillion hedge fund industry with its fast trades in and out of assets “a fool’s game”. On May 5 ‘The Daily Reckoning’ suggests “Practically every one of them is walking around with dynamite taped to its belt”.

Debt: According to the Bank of England, a “surge” in cheap corporate lending and looser credit standards is an increasing danger to the global financial system. ‘The Financial Times’ quotes Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the $1,000bn-plus fund management group, saying “lending to highly indebted companies was becoming lax in ways similar to those that have undermined the US subprime mortgage market, making the leveraged loan market tomorrow’s problem”.

Being the Featured Clipmarks Clipper

Source – Interview with RG Sprigge aka RobertsClips, May 11, 2007

TM2 – How was your experience being the Featured Clipper?

RGS – Today, I was pleasantly surprised to be informed that I was the “featured clipper” on Clipmarks. I had already noted items that I wanted to clip, but might not have got around to doing it. Being Featured Clipper encouraged me that GET CLIPPING, and I did. I clipped stuff from BBC radio on the subjects of Hurricane Katrina (under disaster management), UK identity cards, the £200 a day fee for all trucks in Greater London. I also clipped this year’s Reith Lectures on how popular pressure can improve the lives of the world’s poorest and save the environment too because I feel that my fellow clippers should be aware of such matters.

I felt more part of the Clipmarks community. I also felt that I wanted to tell others outside Clickmarks that I was the featured Clipper. And I like the feeling that I am helping my Followers stay on top of key information flows.

Coal’s Future in Doubt

Source - MuseLetter Special Update, May 10, 2007

MuseLetter #179 (March, 2007), “Burning the Furniture” http://globalpublicmedia.com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_179_burning_the_furniture consisted of a summary of the conclusions of a recent study by the Energy Watch Group (EWG) on future global coal supplies. That study, “Coal: Resources and Future Production,” www.energywatchgroup.org/files/Coalreport.pdf published on April 5, found that global coal production could peak in as few as 15 years. This astonishing conclusion was based on a careful analysis of recent reserves revisions for several nations.

The EWG report has enormous implications for climate change, global energy, and particularly for future electricity supply and steel production in the US and China.

“The Future of Coal,” a study by B. Kavalov and S. D. Peteves of the Institute for Energy (IFE), prepared for European Commission Joint Research Centre, is ready in final draft and will be published within days.

The three primary take-away conclusions from the new coal study are as follows:
- “World proven reserves (i.e. the reserves that are economically recoverable at current economic and operating conditions) of coal are decreasing fast….

- “The bulk of coal production and exports is getting concentrated within a few countries and market players, which creates the risk of market imperfections.  –

- “Coal production costs are steadily rising all over the world, due to the need to develop new fields, increasingly difficult geological conditions and additional infrastructure costs associated with the exploitation of new fields.”

In the course of their discussion, the authors highlight some of the same problems noted in the EWG study having to do with differing grades of coal and the likelihood of supply problems arising first with the highest-grade ores

TM2.0 Comment – One consequence will be that energy produced from coal will be increasingly expensive at the same as the twin peaks of supply and demand are pushing up the price of oil. Much of today’s massive investment in coal generation plants is therefore liable to be wasted, and the considerable extra money for expensive carbon sequestration will not be available.

 

 

Hedge funds – The perfect storm

The New York Fed warned this week that hedge funds posed
the biggest threat to investors since the LTCM crisis of
’98. Back then, the Fed organised a $3.6 billion bailout.
But that kind of money is peanuts today. Another $60
billion was raised by the funds last year alone. Today,
they are a $1.6 trillion industry. And they are much
more leveraged than they were 10 years ago. Practically
every one of them is walking around with dynamite taped
to its belt.

What’s makes the situation especially dangerous is that
they all tend to show up in the same places at the same
time. “Returns are increasingly correlated,” says the
Fed, which is the Fed’s way of saying they are all doing
the same thing. So, when one blows up…they all might
blow up. And when they all blow up…it’s likely to send
a cloud of smoke and debris over the entire world’s
financial markets. (Bill Bonner Daily Reckoning 04/05/07)

Factor in corporate and consumer debt and the future for the global economy is challenging to say the least. On the other hand, local economies should do relatively well, as might the virtual / knowledge economies.

Commercial debt bubble inflates

Money…money…money!  Deals…deals…deals..!

It is glorious to get rich…as Deng Tsaio Ping put it.
And many people, all over the world, think they are bound
for glory.

Meanwhile, the other head hangs down in despair. “Actual
underlying conditions of the world economy continue to
deteriorate,” it mumbles.

Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock, a trillion-dollar fund
management company, spoke out last week and said that all
these mergers and acquisitions were going to cause “tomorrow’s problems.”

Why? Because they are all funded with debt. And lending standards for big, commercial deals have gone the same way as the lending standards for people buying trailers. “Standards have deteriorated to a level that we never even dreamed we would see,” said Fink.

Source -The Daily Reckoning, May 2, 2007 [dailyreckoning@electricmessage.co.uk]

Towards the World Brain

From highlighting pens to faceted clipmarks …

By Jan Wyllie, Trend Monitor 2.0

 

I have been a dedicated highlighter and annotator of what I thought were key bits of text for nearly 40 years now. I learned its use from my father who was a prolific under-liner in pencil, before he became a highlighter himself when marker pens came in.

 

The art of highlighting is about communicating the meaning and significance of key content through time. It is also about expressing judgements and sharing insights. It can be biased – only highlighting text with which the highlighter agrees or disagrees – or it can be as disinterested as humanly possible used only to illustrate key points and quotes.

 

I quickly learned that from my enthusiasm that highlighted items from different books and documents needed juxtaposing, and that book and magazine covers are massive obstacles to research and intelligent reflection. That is why the cutting and clipping of texts (and pictures) was the next step in the paper-only knowledge management process.

 

This was as far as I got, as a university student and a journalist. It’s as far as most people get, and the result is that most of the lovingly highlighted material is lost in the massive log-pile of text, never to be seen again by myself or anyone else for that matter.

 

Luckily for me, may daily newspaper where I was working nights as a desk-editor was closed down, and I got a job as a content analyst from a protégée of John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame. I was taught the well-versed trade of qualitative content analysis – analysing information flows to extract intelligence (key information which would otherwise have been missed). It was then I learned the answer to information and highlighting overload was what was then called multivariate classification, which is now known as faceted classification.

 

I saw with my own eyes in 1982 that if you put high quality highlighting together with a reasonably good faceted classification schema well applied, the result can be a refined intelligence feed good enough for major corporations and government bodies to pay a lot of money read.

 

Then along came computers which many people hoped would make classification obsolete. Every word was indexed, so people could search for and retrieve anything they wanted, instantly and from anywhere. Heady stuff! People, who believed that classification is necessary intellectual tool, were considered either to be out-of-date, or slightly loony.

 

That was when I met Dr. Tony Kent who was one of the original software developers who brought us this near instantaneous free text retrieval capability when he wrote the software which put Chemical Abstracts online. (He also wrote <<STRIX>> in the 1980s which first brought full text database functionality to PCs, but that is another story.)

 

When I met him, Tony was beginning to smell a rat in the brand new world of total accessibility. At a slightly boozy lunch at an English cider bar in Pimlico, I persuaded him that I wasn’t “totally” mad in arguing that multivariate or faceted classification could add significant value to a collection of text documents. He had no difficulty in persuading me that <<STRIX>> was the ideal software for the job. So our 10-year long partnership began.

 

I must confess that despite our best efforts, Tony and I could not compete with the likes of Alta Vista and Google, and the latest <<STRIX>> source code is languishing on an unused, ancient Xenix box (although an Open Source Phoenix version is being contemplated).

 

One of the consequences of our failure to put <<STRIX>> — a fully-fielded, free- text database with Thesaurus – out onto the popular Internet (or even into Windows, it must be said) is that practical knowledge of faceted taxonomies is still restricted to an obscure but dedicated band of “information professionals”.

 

The rest of the world has been ‘googlised’ into thinking that document retrieval — using very basic search terms and tags without any understanding of Boolean logic (which can be taught in half an hour) or any of the grouping and intelligence generation benefits of a multifaceted classification system – is the state of the art.

 

The good news is that there is a lot of room for improvement as the vision of a really intelligent and useful knowledge web for both corporate and individual users is, once again, overwhelmed with the quantity of information retrieved. Users therefore obtain only a very superficial appreciation of questions which the knowledge base could answer based mainly by scanning over the top four of five “most relevant” documents returned by the search engine.

 

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I started using a piece of Web 2.0 software, called ClipMark (http://clipmarks.com/clipper/JICWyllie/ ), I was more or less resigned to the lamentable lack of knowledge organisation and refinement on the net … just another area where human groups could do a lot better, but have not succeeded.

 

After looking at clipmarks for a few minutes, here is part of what I wrote:

 

“Clipmarks is the first vital step towards the collaborative creation of a new level of metaknowledge enabling people to better understand the big picture. The next step is to use multifaceted taxonomies as the intellectual tools for collecting and organising the evidence on which metaknowledge is based.

 

“During the 1930s, H.G.Wells wrote a series of booklets advocating his vision of what he called the ‘World Brain’, by which he meant a common, systematic global organisation of the world’s knowledge. According to Wells, this world encyclopaedia would act as “a clearing house of misunderstandings” and as “a way for humanity to achieve a common perception of a common purpose”. Wells also predicted that intellectual workers would move from the assembly of knowledge to digestion of its meaning with the ultimate goal of achieving “wisdom”, which he defined as “having a sense of knowing what to do when handling complex problems that require understanding and effective decisions”.

 

I did not say that there is not a long way to go, and work to do. But I am serious about large numbers of people needing to learn to use faceted taxonomies combined with free text retrieval to add value to information, and help navigate all the text, sound and visual media. As I will argue in a forthcoming article, the tagging free-for-all which is the dominant information management strategy used for all the exciting new Web 2.0 applications is not good enough or fit for purpose.

 

Nevertheless, Clipmarks, even with its very basic information management capabilities, has given new meaning to my need to highlight the important bits of what I read. Not only do I get to keep and organise my clips with a link to the source, but other people can benefit from your highlights collection. Readers award POPS for Clips which they especially appreciate which is useful for looking for the best stuff, the Clips which have the most POPS. An appreciation measure, and links to the appreciators, also helps motivate Clippers to do a good job. Feedback and chats are invited on every clip. It is even possible to have groups of Followers who sign up to see what leading clippers are adding to their topics of interest.

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with these words:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

With this kind of motivation, people can and have created great things from the Women’s Institutes to Wikipedia and the whole Open Source software movement.

The potential for team working and intense collaboration using classified online clipping services is as yet untried. If people learn how to use it intelligently, this kind of software service (including faceted taxonomy) could lead to a new level of collaborative meta-intelligence that H. G. Wells envisaged – a way of combining the work of many different human intelligences using the purpose built common knowledge frameworks enabled by multi-faceted classification systems.

Writing in the late 1930s, H G Wells believed that what he called a World Mind would be necessary for the survival of our civilisation. If anything, civilisation, and the natural world which supports it, is much closer to its demise now, than it was then. So the need for better intelligence is more pressing than ever.

The great thing is that all the necessary technology already exists. Indeed it has existed for years. There is no need to wait for the imponderables of Artificial Intelligence discoveries or semantic Web algorithms comprehensible only to computer scientists. All individuals and groups can start contributing their intelligence and interests to the content and organisation of corporate clips collections or the World Mind, right now using simple tools and tagging devices like ClipMarks.