4 Responses to 'Husserl and tagging'

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1. J-Wicz
   May 2nd, 2007 at 11:55 pm

   Nice paper. For my the tech­nol­ogy poten­tials are miss­ing. But essen­tially I just started to read Fou­cault recently and thought that his image of “sup­pressed knowl­edge” fits nicely with the strug­gle between tag­ging and SemWeb, and at the end gives this healthy strug­gle a mean­ing. I like the last para­graph from this research paper where the social tag­ging is tak­ing care that the ivory tower ontolo­gies are still con­nected to real­ity and might require adjust­ments from time to time. Still I too believe that it will be the SemWeb which will play a very sig­nif­i­cant role in one or two years time. Sys­tems like deli­cious though will be the incu­ba­tors for tax­onomies (and maybe later ontolo­gies) which have no aca­d­e­mic or defence indus­try lobby.

2. Mo
   May 3rd, 2007 at 10:59 am

   Hi, I think there is a very inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion going on what the two approaches can learn from each other. It is a pity that the seman­tic web is often per­ceived as a very insti­tu­tion­al­ized, nor­ma­tive approach tak­ing away the free­dom of the indi­vid­ual — and you hit the nail on the head with attribut­ing that to the aca­d­e­mic or indus­try back­ground. It just hasn’t “made it” to the nor­mal per­sons. Two more papers I found inter­est­ing with ref­er­ence to this point:

   http://www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/744/ “This paper ana­lyzes impor­tant uses of meta-data in the e-learning domain, from a ped­a­gog­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal point of view, and abstracts from them a set of fun­da­men­tal archi­tec­tural require­ments for Seman­tic Web meta-data. It also describes some flex­i­ble generic tech­niques for work­ing with meta-data, fol­low­ing these requirements.”

   http://www.iasummit.org/2006/files/164Pre­sen­ta­tionDesc.pdf “This paper uses the­o­ries of com­plex­ity, pace lay­er­ing and resilience to address the ques­tion of tag­ging and folk­sonomies, and their influ­ence on the prac­tice of infor­ma­tion architecture. ”

3. J-Wicz
   May 8th, 2007 at 9:15 pm

   I had no time yet to read the first paper, but just read through “From Pace Lay­er­ing to Resilience The­ory”. Some thoughts on that:

   Gen­er­ally I like the state­ment, that infor­ma­tion archi­tects must seri­ously rethink their posi­tion. I like the slightly provoca­tive quote: “The pop­u­lar­ity and sup­posed ben­e­fits of tag­ging in sys­tems like Flickr and del.icio.us sug­gests that these value-added fea­tures are unnec­es­sary, and so, by exten­sion, are infor­ma­tion architects.”

   But there is a basic mis­con­cep­tion in this paper. Beside of the pub­lic libraries and big gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions most infor­ma­tion archi­tects are actu­ally employed by cor­po­ra­tions. You don’t need an infor­ma­tion archi­tect when you tag your pho­tos at Flickr, because you are your own. But the sec­ond you try to con­vince your mates to use the same Flickr tags from your com­mon hol­i­day trip you are putting on the boring/administrative hat of the infor­ma­tion archi­tect. The cor­po­ra­tion is just the extrap­o­la­tion of that. It has so many tags (for­merly known as key­words), that they can essen­tially employ some­one just to think about “tag­ging pat­terns”, that will lead most likely to “lists”, “the­sauri”, “tax­onomies” and maybe on day to “ontolo­gies”. The cor­po­ra­tions sees itself as a legal per­sons (sim­i­lar to Hobbes Leviathan pro­jected onto a com­pany, or http://www.thecorporation.com/ ). It wants to speak a com­mon lan­guage and con­sis­tent mes­sag­ing. Thats the main pur­pose of mar­ket­ing depart­ments and cor­po­rate iden­tity bod­ies. Also inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion suf­fers big times due to incon­sis­tency in data and knowl­edge mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion. So the freshly hired infor­ma­tion archi­tect will try to sort things out. He will most like start giv­ing the whole thing hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures, which is a fair approach, because most com­pa­nies are based on hier­ar­chi­cal think­ing pat­terns any­way. But I agree that he will most likely miss the knowl­edge of the actual users of the appli­ca­tions which they COULD con­tribute in some way. Tag­ging would be a very valid approach.

   Short side­track: and no, search engines sim­ply don’t work effec­tively on cor­po­rate intranets. Not Lucene and most likely not todays Google algo­rithms. But the enter­prise pro­duces a lot of con­tent and needs to put some­where, so either the c-drive (and it is lost after the next crash) or the intranet (and it is lost once it is orphaned and no intranet page points to it).

   So lets assume the approach out­lined in above paper works and suc­cess­ful fast tag­ging feeds good reviewed enter­prise tax­onomies, we will run in a nasty tech­nol­ogy prob­lem: ver­sion­ing of hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures. In cur­rent ECM pack­ages it is so painful and you’ll end up with orphaned con­tent, which you can’t risk. So the atti­tude of never “touch a run­ning sys­tem” starts to creep into the infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture. But it MUST evolve because mar­ket real­ity forces com­pa­nies to do so. “This fits with par­a­digms of com­plex­ity the­ory, in which com­plex sys­tems, if unable to evolve in response to exter­nal stim­uli, merely freeze in place or dis­in­te­grate (Wal­drop 1992).”

   OWL 1.0 has an ver­sion tag in its spec­i­fi­ca­tion and still I per­son­ally don’t know a work­ing and reli­able approach in the seman­tic web world how to tackle this. The DOME project http://dome.sourceforge.net/news.shtml has lit­tle activ­ity to what I can judge. The promis­ing Jena stuff is alpha stage. Cur­rently the FZI in Karl­sruhe does have some active research on this and I’m curios on their results with SOBOLEO http://www.fzi.de/KCMS/kcms_file.php?action=link&id=678 they will present (actu­ally this week? at WWW2007). And http://www.im-wissensnetz.de/ looks promis­ing to. But (and maybe that is the rea­son why I visit blogs like yours) I don’t think that tra­di­tional sim­ple text ren­der­ing will be able to visu­alise these concepts.

4. Moritz Stefaner
   May 10th, 2007 at 2:41 am

   Wow — thanks a lot for your excel­lent comments.

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