Weibel Lines

David Weinberger and Paris Hilton

Library Link of the Day pointed to David Weinberger's recent Tech Talk at Google, in which he flog's his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous.  The talk is an entertaining rendition of why digitization averts the problem of trying to have a single-best-organization for the world.  The book, which I've just started, reaches deeply and none-too-gently into our notions of how the information domain is or should be structured. David dedicated the book 'to the librarians', though  librarians may be forgiven for squirming a bit, especially during his viciously funny send up of Melvil Dui...er... Dewey.

The essence of his argument is that the transformational technology of Web 2.0 is creating an infrastructure of meaning that, in aggregate, is more about us and what we are interested in, than any authority-mediated source like a traditional newspaper or encyclopedia can possibly be.

This isn't to say that David rejects all authority, but rather that hammering its artifacts into pre-categorized structures is inimical to its efficient utilization, and preemptive about what constitutes authority to begin with.  The distinctions between metadata and data disappear in this view -- any fragment in or about a work can be useful in retrieving that work, and the fact that they are all digital allows us to start anywhere and end anywhere.  Herman Melville can lead us to Call me Ishmael, and Call me Ishmael  can lead us to Herman Melville. The other Melvil need play no role.

The buzz du jour around the the offices here today was Facebook's claim as a social utility -- a major primary platform for social networking (thanks to Lorcan for bringing this to my attention).  Part of the announcement included a piece about book reviews:

For example, Facebook and Amazon.com developed a “Book Reviews” applications that lets Facebookers write and show book reviews on their profile pages, and add Amazon ‘Buy’ buttons.

David and Facebook and Amazon all agree that book reviews are pretty important metadata.  Conversations about the uses and users of bibliographic information in our own community  evidence a rising awareness that our own metadata, designed for management and repurposed for discovery, is sorely in need of re-engineering.  We could do a lot worse than follow Weinberger's (and Facebook's and Amazon's) lead... read a book, write about it, and link to the library supply chain.  Perhaps his book dedication is more in the nature of an invocation.

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Oh... yeah... Paris Hilton.... Stars and planets, and self-rounding... watch the video.

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Image: The Southern Theater Proscenium in Columbus, Ohio, before the Eileen Ivers concert with the Promusica Chamber Orchestra (May, 2007)

Neutrality is over-rated

Traditional notions of surrogacy in the library world revolve around catalog records – a neutral distillation of attributes intended to support discovery and management. In the age of the Amazoogles, richness of linking and community-generated surrogates play a welcome role in discovery and evaluation. Several interesting issues emerge from this shift.

Surrogates as first class objects

I’ve alluded to the importance of this in a previous post.  It is part of the perspective shift that is, I believe, fundamental to the transition from Library 1.0 to Library 2.0 thinking.

Neutral surrogates as opposed to evaluative surrogates

Librarians have traditionally positioned themselves in a neutral role… above the ideological fray of content. I think this is as much artifact as intent. A bib record should be a neutral inventory of attributes, and to the extent that the catalog was central to our service, that neutrality served well. Of course, Libraries have long offered reader advisories. Nancy Pearl, Seattle's (the country’s?) best-known librarian (anyone seen a James Billington shushing Action Figure lately?) has acquired a national reputation as a voice of reading.

We have entered the era of recommender services to assist in our every consumer selection. The best example of this in the Library  space is Amazon – the reviews are widely read and eagerly written, and the marketing data (people who bought this, also bought that…) is valuable indeed.  Library Thing has, through the application of now well-understood social collaboration techniques, has introduced a similar functionality that is independent of book purchase.

Which is more valuable as a finding aid? A catalog record or a review? One focuses on discovery, and the other on suitability. But within the everything-indexed context of the Web, both are important, and the distinction blurs.  There is a case to be made for library-mediated evaluative surrogates coexisting cheek-by-jowl with traditional cataloging records.

What about an Amazon-library system mashup?  Just what Amit Gupta has offered (brought to my attention in Lorcan Dempsey's Blog).  All very interesting co-evolution, but what I really wanted to do was show off the Nancy Pearl Action Figure (deluxe Version).  Small Parts. Not suitable for children under 3 or those without a library card.  Who needs Jane Austen, anyway?

Dangerous Waters

Comparisons are odious, and there's nothing scientific about this.   And being an OCLC employee makes manifest my conflict of interest, but the release of WorldCat.org and new enhancements to Google Book Search moved me to do some quick and dirty comparisons.  Disclaimer: I have not discussed this analysis with anyone at OCLC prior to blogging it, nor do I have any special knowledge about the development of WorldCat.org.  I'm writing this as a not-disinterested user.

I tried a few searches on both, and a summary of results follows.  Again, nothing systematic about this... I'm sure we'll see more extensive analysis very quickly.  These services do, however, illustrate how organizations can sometimes be complementary, other-times competitive, and almost certainly co-evolutionary.

Search 1: Freakonomics

I chose this because it is the latest book I reviewed, and perhaps typifies a search-for-new-stuff-to-buy-or-borrow. 

Google results

• 13 results:
  •    12 english
  •     1 french

The target is the top result. There were no duplicates, no non-English language versions (though there was a result in French). The non-target results appear to be resources that mention Freakonomics, and which thus might be very useful in a browsing sense: good fan-out to related resources. Cover art enhances the result set -- a definite plus. Links to other materials related to a given resource were very good: preview capabilities, table of contents, index, and about this book (which provides links to reviews, for example).  These are great features that are currently not available via WorldCat, and which need to be in some manner if libraries are to offer a competitive Web presence in the long haul. 

WorldCat results

• 11 results
  • English (4)
  • Chinese (2)
  • Danish (1)
  • French (1)
  • Korean (1)
  • Portuguese (1)

Ten of the 11 are non-English language versions, or duplicates (three English language records that appear to be the same item). The 11th is a complete mystery to me.  It seems to be in the field of economics, but has no obvious key in common with the search target.

No cover art, or rather, cover art becomes evident only at the item level, not in the search result set. Very useful sidebar next to the result-set allowing you to refine (or redefine) your search by author, content, format, language, year of publication.  This ability to involute the database is very helpful and easy, and offsets to some degree not having the ancillary material that Google has (but not enough, in my opinion).

Search 2: Plato's Republic

Google 109,000 pages

Once again, cover art and other materials (much less advantageous in the case of a standard classic, I should think).  The large catch reflects the search approach, I assume.  The first page results includes several versions of the target, and other branch-points that might be useful to a reader.  Do they mean 109,000 pages, or items?

Worldcat  590 results

The first page of the WorldCat search  does not appear to have the search target, but rather, critical reviews, essays, and such.   The sidebar becomes immediately useful... click on PLATO under authors, and you get various versions of the real deal, all authored by Plato.  In this case, this is particularly important, because translations are very much unique works that will earn their own reputations and followings.   The side bar says there are 22.  CLick on it, and you get 31.  Still, a pretty concise list of Platonics.

You can do an advanced search in Google Books, as well, filling in PLATO in the author field, which narrows the field to 22,700 pages.  Really?  Not very helpful.

OK, but the one I wanted is not in either set (well, perhaps buried in the 22,700, but that's not helpful).  I'm looking for Allan David Bloom's translation, as a friend told me this is a really good one, and I know of Bloom's other work as well.  Turns out that it's not on my list of 31 in WorldCat.  I've been given the ISBN though, [0-465-06934-7], so I try that in the search box, and voilà.  I have the single record I want.  Why didn't I get it the first time?  Because the title is The Republic of Plato, and my first search was on Plato's Republic.   Where is FRBR when we need it?

How about in Google Books? The same ISBN 0-465-06934-7 gives me:

A Willful Volunteer: Examining Conscience in an Unconscious World. 

Huh?  The quirkiness of ISBNs is well-known to librarians.  I've encountered the problem a number of times... an alarming number of times, though not in a systematic way.   I'm surprised that the problem surfaces in one service but not the other, though.  Do the same ISBN search in plain Google, and you get desired book as the first of 17 results (the others are things such as course syllabi that cite the ISBN).   Nowhere in this set is the above tome, willful, conscientious, or not.  Sounds like a data integrity problem to me.

Worldcat seems to outperform Google Books here, and this is what one might expect, given that the search is much more in the conventional catalog-search idiom.

Search 3: The Jefferson Bible (by ISBN)

A final example that I've written about before and so wanted to try here.   As I've related before, what is important about this little book to me is the introduction and afterward in the particular version I have in hand.  So, the instance counts (for me) more than the work.

The verso of this volume lists two ISBNs:
0-8070-7702-x (cloth)
0-8070-7702-1 (paper)

The first ISBN takes me to a pair of duplicate records in WorldCat.  There is no result in Google Books.

The second has no records in either service... not terribly surprising, given that its a paperback version of a book that is rather obscure to start with, and which is thus less likely to be cataloged by a library.

Some observations based on these brief explorations:

• Google Book's is a strong offering in the library catalog space, offering great features that WorldCat does not now offer.  We need the Open Content Alliance, or something like it, in order to be a stronger player in this space, and we need to take full advantage of it.  Google's digitization efforts are an important contribution to the information world, but the common good is better served by an open architecture that allows others to both create and capitalize on this value.
• Google is well positioned to create additional value through linkages to related information (again, OCA is the obvious pathway by which such value could be open to others).
• The WorldCat approach to refining a search seems superior to me... i don't have to fill in another set of fields (let alone click to a new page), and there are obvious selections made for me that allow me to initiate a new search in the sidebar.  Involuting the database in this way has lots of great potential.  Will people use it?  Hard to tell.  I'm guessing that it will be used modestly, but will be a strong asset for those who do.  More of this, please.
• As libraries start to work out the last mile logistics, getting a book from the library via WorldCat.org will be as convenient as buying it online... and cheaper, of course (at  least for the patron).
• Users will benefit from FRBRization of such services.   Should The Republic of Plato have appeared within a search for Plato's Republic?  Yeah, for sure.  How realistic is it to expect that it can be achieved using economical approaches to FRBRization?  Good question.   
• Neither of these services embodies much of the so-called social software paradigm, though Google Books certainly has some of the elements in place (searching for reviews, for example).   Social bibliography - reviews, tagging, recommender systems, and the like,  will be a critical element of public bibliography, and the library community has some catchup to do here.  I couldn't help but notice that the Google Books About this Book link seemed to have lots of Library Thing review links.
• And Identifiers.  OCLC's permalinks (OCLC numbers embedded in a WorldCat link) go a long way towards the goal of a standardized, persistent, and succinct identifier for library content.  As a blogger, I hope that the permalink might be displayed prominently at the top of each record, (a click away is further than it needs to be).  It is far superior to a transactional link, and in fact, the lack of a permalink in Google Books seems an oversight (understandable, if your world-view is dominated by search hegemony). 
• The ability to construct a useful identifier with an ISBN (or any other standard identifier, for that matter) is a Good Thing(tm).  My brief examples here show that it is not without complications, though.  I don't know the magnitude of the problem.  It isn't obvious that the WorldCat search box is ISBN friendly, though it clearly is.  Not sure if its important to make this explicit.

Who would have imagined a decade ago that bibliography would be newsworthy, and of broad public interest?  It is, and its really great to have WorldCat at one's fingertips.  The other guys are doing great stuff too.   Bravo!
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Image: A Marmot (I think) sunning himself or herself on Mt. Rainier, July 2006

When last we left our Hero....

Other points that TBL made in his AAAI keynote (as inferred from news.com):

• Developers should use semantic languages and RDF
• Tagging will improve semantic efficacy on the Web
• The Web is the database, and RDF defines its syntax

We all agree that we want more from the Web. Not just pages, but structured data that facilitates recombination. This is essential to so-called Web 2.0 enterprise. Tim’s support of tagging acknowledges, importantly, I think, the role of people at large in driving semantics onto the Web. Not just catalogers, not just publishers, data-providers, and IT departments. End-users. (Never mind that there are no end-users in a graphical world… we’re mostly chain users.) The benefits of [bottom-up] tagging, and its relationship to top-down systems like ontologies, thesauri, knowledge organization systems, and controlled vocabularies, remains to be elucidated in any long-term way. Certainly the hype and expectation is strong, and evidence of value accumulates in the business plans and performance of myriad Start-Up 2.0s.

We can agree that the Web is a database of sorts. The Database, in fact. It lacks the formalisms of relational databases, but embodies the powerful idiom of linkage, making it both naturally object-oriented and graph-based -- flexible, extensible, robust, self-organizing.  Unwieldy, too.

RDF is intended to provide some of the missing formalisms, and thereby make the data more interoperable, recombinant, and hence re-useful. It adds little value in a closed system, and hence has experienced only modest adoption.  Presumably its value will be greater in the open system of the Web. Of course, most applications have been designed to work in closed systems, leaving RDF a long-suffering next-year’s technology.

The confusion between RDF Schema and XML schema, overlapping but disjoint schema declaration idioms, went on for years, and did little to bolster RDF’s prospects.  I'm afraid the W3C itself has to own-up to responsibility for this.

Has next-year arrived with Web 2.0 and the emergence of Web applications? As interoperability and recombination become the main attractions rather than sideshows, RDF and related enabling technologies may rise in importance, finally getting onto page-one specifications.  I think this is Tim's hope and expectation.

Google’s Norvig might point out that injecting/extracting meaning from a proprietary commercial perspective… the normalization layer alluded to in Hitchhiker 650… is likely to happen faster and have longer legs than promulgating encoding standards that require well intentioned and well informed users to deploy.   In fact, I think that has been a frequent message.  The enthusiastic acceptance of so much of what Google does (and does well), is compelling evidence that there is plenty of semantics on the Web... just not necessarily the  W3C variety.  Will Google thus own the semantic Web, by virtue of having driven normalization-layer innovation? Thinking….

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Image: Rowboats at the Center for Wooden Boats on Lake Union in Seattle, taken during the annual wooden boat show.  I'm going to spend my next life in their workshop, leaving only for forays to to Allegro  for lattes and Magus for used books.

In this Corner... Sir Tim, Inventor of the Web...!

The face-off between Tim Berners-Lee and Peter Norvig (it is probably too pointed to call it that), came from Tim's AAAI keynote flogging the potential of the Semantic Web, and the importance of various enabling technologies in bringing that to pass.  Mr. "When I invented the Web" is the right man for the job.  His vision and practicality in bringing us this most wonderously cobbled together platform has succeeded, as wiser pundits than I have observed, in part because of its ability to fail gracefully.  Document not found?  Look elsewhere... the system doesn't fail, though.  Website gone? Pity, but there are lots of others, and the system doesn't fail.  The system... the Web... is simple and resilient, and is layered on another elegantly simple and resilient system -- the Domain Name Service.

But the Semantic Web... well, semantics aren't so simple.  If the news reports about Tim's talk (and my inferences) are close, the points he made are roughly:

• Persistent Identifiers are critical
• Developers should use semantic languages and RDF
• Tagging will improve semantic efficacy
• The Web is the database, and RDF defines its syntax

Persistent Identifiers are indeed central to the problem.   I may assume too much, but I think Tim's perspective is that URIs as they exist today -- essentially, URLs -- are enough for all purposes.  On this, I would disagree. 

From a technical point of view, he is, of course, correct.  The operational characteristics of URLs, in conjunction with the DNS system, are sufficient to meet any identity requirement for online resources.  It is in the realm of policy that problems emerge.   Tim's assertion that important identifiers be persistent speaks to this, though not convincingly enough in my judgment.

The problem is that Identifiers are overloaded and multifaceted.  They play different roles at different points in the lifecycle of the resources they identify.  Changes are made to meet the exigencies of changing business models, and naming-theoretic arguments just don't hold up to those imperatives. 

Norvig's observations that users often don't understand the significance of the technical decisions that they make (or don't make) bolsters this view.

<unsubstantiated supposition follows>
So, without branded identifiers -- identifiers whose form and syntax proclaim that they are managed according to publicly defined policies -- achieving robust identity networks will be more difficult.
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image: Woodpecker, taken in May in the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, downstream from Mt. Rainier glaciers.  Andy Powell and I walked the refuge on his visit here for the DCMI Usage Board meeting.  I should note that Andy's admonition about identifiers... that departures from standard Web protocols in defining identifier systems will inevitably reduce their long term persistence, is always prominent in my thinking.

Dr. Theory and Mr. Practice

Michael Braley, one of our summer Semantic Web discussion group faithful, brought to our attention what sounds like it must have been a very interesting Q&A session at a recent keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, and a question by Peter Norvig of Google (reported by News.com).  Quite a moment, to have these larger-than-life icons of the New Millenium postulating on our future. 

Piecing the discussion together from various news reports and blog posts, several interesting issues emerge.  Not for the first time, any of them... their appearance at News.com has mostly to do with the respective authority of speakers.  The high level points:

TBL:

 

• Persistent Identifiers are critical
• Developers should use semantic languages and RDF
• Tagging will improve semantic efficacy
• The Web is the database, and RDF defines its syntax

Norvig:

• Users can be incompetent or venal:
  
  • They often can’t configure software or systems properly, let alone tag things usefully.
  • They often intentionally mislead so as to try to sell us Viagra
• Market leaders have a disincentive to standardize – they benefit from differentiated services and products, not being the same. (talking, I infer, about a general competitive attitude, not necessarily about Google policies).

And after-comments by Hitchhiker’s Guide to 650, on the topic of the web migrating towards private ownership and control via the ‘normalization layer’:

The Google search engine is probably in the best position out of all
the EXISTING technologies out there to be that layer, it kind of is
for humans. The unfortunate ramification (that TBL would be sad to
admit) is that SOMEONE will own the semantic web, not as a standards
body or content owner, but as the normalization/extraction layer. If
Google is able to garner monopolitic growth without a naturally
monopolitic product or business model (search engine), it is not
without a huge leap of faith that in the future a player (maybe
google) will be able to exact a toll for being the de facto router/
translator of data on the web. . . this is a scary thought . . . the
end of the open web? (and these guys are freaked out about net
neutrality?)

Aside: I’m happy to acknowledge that I don’t know who all the cool people are, but I sort of wish they wouldn’t be quite so secretive so we might be able to find out without becoming investigative. Looking at the 650 blog, I could find that the author was apparently important at eBay, has since moved to Green Dot (whatever that is) in LA.  Not much more.

More on these topics to follow....

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Image: The Suzzalo Library is the signature structure of the University of Washington.  This stunning reading room has few peers anywhere in the cathedral-of-reason department. (by the author, April 2006)

Irony... yeah, I know what that is...

Evelyne Viegas, a student in the MSIM program here at UW, is doing an independent study with me this summer on the semantic Web and collaborative software, and as part of that, she and I have established a semantic web discussion group that meets at the Third Place Bookstore (and cafe and pub) every couple of weeks.  This is the academy we always dreamed about: books, beer, coffee, and camaraderie.  And people come! 

First of all, how cool is it that bookstores here provide social space for community events?  Not just a place to buy coffee, but a space for events.  Third Place alludes to the place other than home and work, where people congregate for sustenance and community. Is it accident or irony that Amazon, the slayer of independent bookstores, sits high on a hill overlooking Seattle, home of a vibrant ecology of independent bookstores?

But i digress.  Half a dozen to a dozen would-be and actual semioticians gather every other week to explore the manifestations of meaning on the Web, and how to encourage and capitalize on it.   Last night's topics ranged across:

• the slippery boundary between authoring and metadata creation
• SLATES as organizing principles for Web 2.0 (see my earlier post)
• Ranganathan's categories (Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time)
• THERE.COM
• virtual economies
• derived ontologies and electronic warrant
• RDF as the love child of Platonic logic
• ORKUT.COM (you need an invitation... sniff)
• PREFOUND.COM
• TRIBE.NET
• Dogear, social bookmarking in the enterprise from IBM
• Michael Braley and Geoff Froh's enterprise tagging MSIM capstone project
• The Strength of Weak Ties (or, why people should share bookmarks on needle point , knitting, and USB 2.0 devices).
• EUREKSTER.COM
• microformats
• and more....

Most troubling question of the evening (Michael Braley):

Is Myspace the leading manifestation of semantics on the Web?

It is certainly among the most popular... in fact, this past week, Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that US visits to MySpace led all other sites for the first time.  Yikes!

Finally, the award in the category of If-you-can't-define-it-you-don't-really-know, goes to Kevin O'Halloran, graduate of the the iSchool and currently at Microsoft, who offers the following definition of irony:

a measure of the distance between text and subtext

OK... i think I got it.  Finally.

Now... what would MySpace for grownups look like?

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image: Seattle's skyline at night, taken from a pier on Alaska Way on a crisp evening in July

Clean SLATES

A colleague shared with me an article by Andrew P. McAfee in the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

Andrew's blog entry on the topic is also worth attention.

OK... I sense the rolling of eyes (2.0 at a time)… aren’t we all tired of Everything 2.0. Maybe, but if you’re looking for a memorable pneumonic that actually imparts insight, this article has it.

The piece distinguishes between information systems as platforms (websites, intranets, portals) and channels (email, instant messaging, telephone, conversation). The one category, created by the few, accessible to the many. The other, created by many, for the many, but very little sharing. Enter Web 2.0.

McAfee’s pneumonic is SLATES, and it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.

Paraphrasing McAfee:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good | interesting | important | useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

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Image: this owl was kind enough to pose for me along the side of the road on the way to Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park this past weekend. 

 

Tag Team Wrestling

Tim "LibraryThing" Spalding has just announced a new feature on LibraryThing, currently the most impressive instance of so-called Library 2.0 that I know of.  The new feature addresses a topic that many (including myself) have been wrestling with for a while now: the relationship of formal knowledge organization systems to folksonomies.  Tim's Mother's Day blog post speaks to the raging controversy:

Are tags better than subjects? Are subjects better than tags? Are tags just a fad? Will tags replace subjects? Are tags evil? Are subjects evil? (Believe me, the idea is out there.) Librarians have become deeply emeshed in the debate, with partisans on both sides. Until now, there hasn't been much in the way of hard data, at least for books. LibraryThing provides that.

This last is the exciting part.  LT has provided a platform to explore the behaviors of both in a coherent, data-rich system.  Researchers, start your systems!

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image: Carolyn Dunford, of the UW MLIS program,alerted me to a lovely wildlife preserve nearly within slingshot distance of the UW (known as the Montlake FIll).  This is a closeup of one or another species of Horsetail (Thanks to Bob O'Hara for the ID), taken at the preserve. 

Cheep Links

Geoff Froh, one of the MSIM graduate students who has befriended me during my stay here at the UW iSchool, sent me the following link from last September that has a lot of great ideas about creating a richer web of information -- cheaply:

Using Wikipedia and the Yahoo API to give structure to flat lists

Hackdiary is Matt Biddulph’s idea-rich blog of his travels through Web 2.0.

 

The post that motivated this entry is a succinct description of some of Matt’s work at the BBC, but it transfers pretty much wholesale to what we should be doing more of with library data:

"adding value to your own data by using external information"

Biddulph’s post emphasizes some of the benefits of the open Web that are available to anyone with a creative vision of how to capitalize on them to create more value at low cost.

One of my early blog entries was about the addition of name authority data into the German Wikipedia, and I seem to be bouncing back again and again to the concept of public bibliography – creating rich semantic linkages around traditionally-described formal resources that gives them context and heightens their visibility in Web space.   Using the open Web to enrich our assets while in turn contributing to the information assets of the Commons embodies the reciprocal creation of value that fits neatly within our tradition and is, I believe, critical to our future.

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image: Gulls ride for free on the Washington State Ferries.   And they aren't bashful.  March, 2006, near Orcas Island in the San Juans