If theory and research are meant to inform practice, recommendations need to be current, relevant, and actionable. This can be hard to achieve in a domain that develops so quickly. Checkland (1998) observed a while ago how it is very hard for theory to keep up and be informative, thereby failing to match the “ideal” dynamic:

Checkland's ideal for theory informing practice

Whilst a range of research-theoretical stances can be taken, justified and accepted by the research community, only some seem to be close enough to practice to usefully inform it. This is where the researchers are either experimenting directly through design, or are involved enough to really engage with the language, problems and possible solutions in the domain. So I would favour interpretive or action research approaches in this regard:

Levels of engagement and theoretical stance (based on Aakhus & Jackson (2005))

Whilst the more descriptive, long view can still be valuable, it is hard to realise this value unless the knowledge gained is acted on by those implementing new designs and approaches. As they are the ones reading the research, this should perhaps be the research community itself in the first instance. Design improvement can then be further communicated through demonstrators, but these need to be compelling enough to be taken seriously.

References

1. Aakhus, M. and Jackson, S., 2005. Technology, Interaction and Design. In: Fitch, K.L. and Sanders, R.E.( eds) Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. LEA, pp. 411-433
2. Checkland, P .and Holwell ,S. 1998. Information, Systems and Information Systems: Making Sense of the Field John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, NY, USA

Originally reviewed for the BCS Information Retrieval Specialists Group Newsletter “The Informer“

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research, held in Corfu in October 2007. The conference had a 50% acceptance rate, with most of the presented papers being published in the book.

Despite the fact that many papers present only interim or early research work, the volume provides a fascinating overview of a cross section of metadata and semantics research in both pure form and as applied in a variety of domains, including those of cultural heritage, education and agriculture. In addition to the advances in these individual fields and domains, one is able to determine some general trends and patterns running through the work presented. Perhaps overriding all is the sense that many researchers and archivists are struggling with the problem of balancing the complexity of describing information resources within a domain adequately, while at the same time ensuring that discrete sets of knowledge can actually be successfully linked and that systems which can guide the user in retrieval and discovery can be usefully developed on top of these structures.

Immediately apparent as one reads the volume is the dominance of semantic web approaches to metadata and knowledge modelling, influencing migrations from stand-alone formats and conventions to those based on semantic web standards such as RDF and OWL. Sections are devoted to semantic web applications and to ontology engineering. In several places one sees how such approaches can provide the missing semantic aspect to rather more well-established syntactic rules and begin to enable reasoning and knowledge discovery through the use of ontologies. In Semantic Application Profiles: A Means to Enhance Knowledge Discovery in Domain Metadata Models, for instance, Koutsomitropoulos and colleagues show how the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model for cultural heritage can be represented in OWL and used to discover related works (using a painting example). In Capturing MPEG-7 Semantics, Dasiopoulou et al, argue that a semantic model is needed to enhance and disambiguate multimedia mark-up enabled by the MPEG-7 format. Also very much worthy of mention in this regard is good the article by Voss, Encoding changing country codes for the Semantic Web with ISO 3166 and SKOS which demonstrates with a grounded example how changes and versioning can be accommodated using the RDF based Simple Knowledge Organisation System. This is clearly paramount when considering the provision of globally applicable yet cohesive and adaptive data sets.

The complexity of and unwieldiness of ontologies has been an issue in the past and several of the papers address this by providing either automated means of deriving ontology structures or reviewing tools used (or needed) for ontology and semantic web data manipulation.

In the first category, Ensemble Learning of Economic Taxonomy Relations from Modern Greek Corpora by Kermanidis shows how a number of clustering algorithms can be applied in combination to arrive at quite a high level of accuracy in deriving relations, based only on the learning sets themselves. In A new Formal Concept Analysis-based learning approach to Ontology Building, Jia and colleagues promote the FCA approach in providing a lattice of concepts rather than the hierarchy given by other popular clustering methods, which they argue as being more “true to life”. Jia et al then show how the derived ontology can then be used to provide a query refinement/expansion method.

In terms of user tools, Cardoso provides a useful state of the art in use of software to manipulate RDF data and ontologies in The Semantic Web : A mythical story or solid reality , and Enokksson et al address the problem of the remote and in-place modification of RDF in An RDF Modification Protocol based on the needs of Editing Tools.

While there are a number of papers that demonstrate derivations and developments of specialised or extended ontologies and metadata schemes, I found the more pragmatic papers to be more valuable and progressive for the way they manage to remain in touch with the ultimate aim of their work. A nice balance between the convenience of machine cataloguing and the need for oversight of human cataloguers is struck in Whitelaw and Collins’ Pragmatic support for taxonomy-based annotation of structured digital documents. The authors describe the derivation of metadata for Open University course documents (based on IEEE Learning Object Metadata) using a series of more- or less automated approaches and then having these evaluated by library cataloguing staff. The optimal solution was found to be where terms are suggested from the vocabulary based on document content, but where the staff member can click through to the definition before confirming the use of the term as metadata. The authors also begin to look at the cost benefit ratio of collecting more detailed metadata to a slight increase in cataloguing effort. While these authors don’t get as far as exploring the efficiency of retrieval of documents, this is handled in Cervera et als’ Quality Metrics in Learning Objects which stresses the reusability objective and notes that quality metrics are crucial to the navigation of resources. Notably, Cervera et al describe the need for socially based rankings and ratings to be incorporated into the metadata scheme.

A further example of attempts to enhance the usability and comparability of metadata is provided by Nilsson et al in Formalizing Dublin Core Application Profiles: Description Set Profiles and Graph Constraints. A number of practical measures for introducing conventions for how metadata elements are used and coded are presented, including standard templates and the use of a wiki to provide for easy human editing of profiles which can then also be exported at XML, thereby bridging the gap between qualitative and more structured usage guides.

Against this general background of attempts to standardise, enable interoperability between collections and provide enhanced semantic infrastructures you have the inherent messiness of human decisions as to meaning and the complexity of the encoding act itself, something that is probably not discussed enough in this community but which is covered in Scifleet et al’s The Human Art of Encoding: Markup as Documentary Practice. The authors note that metadata cataloguing is socially situated and may often be idiosyncratic, though the extent to which this may affect quality and comparability is poorly known. They report on a programme of research to study this variety in the practice of participants in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Unfortunately their full findings are not covered in this volume but are well worth following up for those interested in this important question.

In summary, this is an interesting and varied read, with enough “current state of the art” review papers to interest the non-specialist as well as some good fodder for those already wrestling with metadata, semantics and knowledge representation issues within particular domains.

To see them in the context of the conference programme, I converted the tweets and the event schedule to XML suitable for display in a Simile Timeline. Click the screenshot below to access the resulting timeline mashup (nb tweets take a few seconds to load).

What would have made this exercise easier, and the conference tweets easier to track:

• If the conference programme had been published in a more mashable format eg iCal / XML
• If there was a way to identify a particular conference track (a sub hashtag? – or is that overkill?)
• A way to distinguish critical comments, reportage, and general flim-flam. Though perhaps that is part of the fun!

The graphic below shows the Bristolian IDs with the most friends who are also located in Bristol. The most highly connected accounts are in red towards the centre. The highest number of Bristolian friends was 183 (bristolnews), with the average number 11, though stats like this of course ignore the fact that many people don’t report their location (or do report it as lat/long). An initial look shows that “traditional” media corporate – and individual – IDs are well linked in, but that social and creative orgs. and those backed by online community sites are also among the most popular.

When I get time, the plan is to categorise IDs by sector and by individual / corporate (though there is a large number of in-betweens). There are also signs that the accounts are organised into four distinct clusters and it will be interesting to see if there is any discernible basis to this.

Here is a Wordle of the user bios. Not too many surprises here – a good overview of Bristol’s online creative community – though the prominence of tea was interesting (23 mentions) in comparison to coffee (8) !

In this chapter of the Annual Review, Fallis argues for social epistemology as the best philosophical underpinning to information science. Providing access to society’s knowledge through recorded information is argued as the main reason for information services. Interestingly, social epistemology was first coined in information science (by Shera) , though was also developed as an idea independently within philosophy.

Fallis covers the debates within philosophy as to what constitutes knowledge, and how these have been viewed by information scientists, most of whom have naturally taken more pragmatic perspectives. He also notes the different (classic v revolutionary) views of social epistemology, with the former a social extension of the established idea of knowledge as justified true belief, but the latter taking the social constructivist line. A further useful distinction made is between social epistemology as a normative project — the goal of which is to maximise knowledge acquisition (or at least maximise access to authoritative information) — and the sociology of knowledge, which is about understanding and describing how social factors contribute to knowledge making.

In outlining debates about necessity of the truth condition, Fallis notes that librarians will help the user try to discover the “truth”, which the user in turn sees as the key objective of using the service. That said, it is acknowledged that the collection owner cannot possibly know whether all the facts contained therein are true.

Some interesting and important conclusions come from acknowledging the centrality of social epistemology in this way:

1. That epistemic principles should guide collection organisation (e.g. by type of claim and evidence offered);
2. That information providers should collocate a range of viewpoints on a topic to allow the seeker to better determine the truth (a principle taken from Mill’s On Liberty);
3. That any aspect of an information service that enables the social acquisition of knowledge is as important as any other (sofas and coffee bars are as important as books)- I liked this one!

I felt this to be a very rich and balanced article with many considerations of lasting relevance as we move into the digital age. I also really liked the exploration of the underlying goals of information services, a topic that needs to be foregrounded more often.

Bill Gates’ keynote began by focusing on the big problems in development that his Foundation is targeting — childhood mortality, immunisation and education. Perhaps to deliberately deemphasise ICT, he introduced it only later in his talk, where he talked about scalability and learning to recognise those projects with a genuine impact while recognising failures (citing Digital Green and M-Pesa as successful examples). In doing so, there was some feeling that he was not giving due regard to the importance of localised, context-dependent solutions (eg Richard Heeks’ response)

Ricardo Legorreta's impressive Carnegie Mellon building in Doha

Earlier in the day, a very interesting study by Melissa Ho and colleagues on ICT for health in Ghana had compared a top-down, government-sponsored solution with a more bottom-up practitioner-led initiative. Both solutions dealt with communication and referrals between health care professionals, the former being based on a web platform and the latter a mobile solution. The study found more uptake with the latter, though interestingly this also seemed to have some unintended consequences, such as doctors’ phones going off at inopportune moments. This seemed to typify the delicate balance between over-structured “official” systems which struggle for uptake and the unstructured, occasionally chaotic outcomes with a user-led approach. The interesting question for me is whether such community-led work can develop sufficient structure and conformity for the solution to work efficiently into the long term.

Among the other (mostly very good) presentations that stood out for me was that by Aishwarya Ratan et al from Microsoft Research on Kelsa+, which did an ethnographic study of off-duty workers using a PC, capturing some compelling footage of workers teaching themselves basic computing through peer observation and experimentation.

The poster presentations and system demos were great, and although I didn’t get round to all of them I had a very good live demo of Frontline SMS linked to Ushahidi for participatory crisis reporting and a look at the Moca system for remote diagnosis in healthcare.

Carlos Braga giving his closing keynote

In his closing keynote, Carlos Braga of the World Bank talked about the global financial crisis and how it will continue to hit developing countries hard. While acknowledging the role of ICT in the credit crisis (through enabling complex but opaque derivative calculations), it is increasingly shown to play a strong role in economic growth. Braga compared the development trajectories of South Korea and Ghana, attributing a large amount of the divergence between the two on the better harnessing of knowledge in Korea. Braga also made use of the excellent animated bubble chart for GDP growth from Gapminder World

In sum, it was a privilege to get to sample the range of quality research and innovation going on in the ICT4D space. While the theoretical navel-gazing was occasionally wearing, there were also real signs of an emerging, more balanced synergy between the power of ICT and the headline issues in global development.

This paper argues for a social capital approach to system analysis, based on the failure of KM 1.0 to acknowledge the importance of factors such as community ties and belonging to motivate and stimulate knowledge sharing. Intoducing sociotechnical approaches to design, the authors stress the need to understand “infoculture” (providing the motivation) in addition to infrastructure (opportunity) and infostructure (ability). These correspond to the relation-based, structural and cognitive dimensions of social capital respectively.

Design approaches that concentrate on structural aspects are criticised as technologically deterministic, and more socially determined design approaches are needed to better adapt technology to the real ways that people interact.

Written as it was before the meteoric rise and mainstreaming of social networking and web 2.0, the paper shows its datedness through some of the examples cited. But many of the principles expressed, such as the need for ethnography and pattern recognition are highly relevant today.

The hypothesis closes the paper – that better social alignment of IT will reduce the need for sociotechnical brokers – has probably not been borne out despite the popularising of the social web. Though perhaps these roles are becoming more devolved to “normal users” today.