Semantic Infrastructure for KM 2.0 A new approach to folksonomies and other knowledge representations

1
Semantic Infrastructure for KM 2.0 A new
approach to folksonomies and other knowledge
representations

• Tom ReamyChief Knowledge Architect
• KAPS Group
• Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
• http//www.kapsgroup.com

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2.0 Themes

• Tags are great because you throw caution to the
  wind, forget about whittling down everything into
  a distinct set of categories and instead let
  folks loose categorizing their own stuff on their
  own terms." - Matt Haughey - MetaFilter
• Its MySpace meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets
  Google on steroids.
• Its ignorance meets egotism meets bad taste
  meets mob rule on steroids. The Cult of the
  Amateur Andrew Keen
• Things fall apart the center cannot holdMere
  anarchy is loosed upon the world,The best lack
  all conviction, while the worstAre full of
  passionate intensity. - The Second Coming
  W.B. Yeats

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Agenda

• Introduction
• Essentials of Folksonomies
• Advantages, Disadvantages, and Dangers of
  Folksonomies
• Improving the Quality of Folksonomies
• Facets and Flickr
• Del.icio.is Topics, Popularity and Findability
• Semantic Infrastructure Solution
• Elements of Semantic Infrastructure / KM 2.0
• Evolving Folksonomies
• Ontologies and Natural categories
• Conclusion

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KAPS Group

• Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
  (KAPS)
• Consulting, strategy recommendations
• Knowledge architecture audits
• Partners Convera, Inxight, FAST, and others
• Taxonomies Enterprise, Marketing, Insurance,
  etc.
• Taxonomy customization, ontology development
• Intellectual infrastructure for organizations
• Knowledge organization, technology, people and
  processes
• Search, content management, portals,
  collaboration, knowledge management, e-learning,
  etc.

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Essentials of Folksonomies?

• Wikipedia A folksonomy is an Internet-based
  information retrieval methodology consisting of
  collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that
  categorize content such as Web pages, online
  photographs, and Web links.
• A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a
  taxonomy done by users, not professionals,
• Example sites Del.icio.us and Flickr (not
  really no feedback)
• It is just metadata that users add
• Key social mechanism for seeing other tags

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Advantages of Folksonomies

• Simple (no complex structure to learn)
• No need to learn difficult formal classification
  system
• Lower cost of categorization
• Distributes cost of tagging over large population
• Open ended can respond quickly to changes
• Relevance Users own terms
• Support serendipitous form of browsing
• Easy to tag any object photo, document,
  bookmark
• Better than no tags at all
• Getting people excited about metadata!

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Disadvantages of Folksonomies - Quality

• They dont work very well for finding
• No structure, no conceptual relationships
• Flats lists do not a onomy make
• Issues of scale popular tags already showing a
  million hits
• Limited applicability only useful for
  non-technical or non-specialist domains
• Either personal tags (others cant find) or
  popularity tags lose interesting terms (Power
  law distribution)
• Most people cant tag very well learned skill
• Errors misspellings, single words or bad
  compounds, single use or idiosyncratic use

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Dangers of Folksonomies

• Unwisdom of Crowds
• We find that whole communities suddenly fix
  their minds upon one object, and go mad in its
  pursuit that millions of people become
  simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and
  run after it, till their attention is caught by
  some new folly more captivating than the first.
• From witch hunts to tulipomania to stock market
  crash
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness
  of Crowds
• Tyranny of the majority
• Popularity drowns quality
• Narrowing of choices, lost content

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Better Folksonomies

• Will social networking make tags better?
• Not so far example of Del.icio.us same tags
• Quality and Popularity are very different things
• Most people dont tag, dont re-tag
• Study folksonomies follow NISO guidelines
  nouns, etc but do they actually work see
  analysis
• Most tags deal with computers and are created by
  people that love to do this stuff not regular
  users and infrequent users Beware true
  believers!

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Flickr Facets
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Flickr Facets

• Basic Facets over 90 of content
• Place Amsterdam to Beach 40
• Events, Date, People, Things / Animals, Color
• Subject Matter less than 1
• Works on lower level scales
• Artparade, tourofbritain, stgilesfair,
  hideoutblockparty (last weeks)
• Faceted navigation extremely powerful, easy to
  use to find
• How to develop automatic facets?
• Design facet system one time cost, some
  monitoring
• Entity Extraction, suggested placement

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Del.icio.us Tags

• Design blog software music tools reference art
  video programming webdesign web2.0 mac howto
  linux tutorial web free news photography shopping
  blogs css imported education travel javascript
  food games
• Development inspiration politics flash apple tips
  java google osx business windows iphone science
  productivity books toread helath funny internet
  wordpress ajax ruby research humor fun technology
  search opensource
• Photoshop media recipes cool work article
  marketing security mobile jobs rails lifehacks
  tutorials resources php social download diy
  ubuntu freeware portfolio photo movies writing
  graphics youtube audio online

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Del.icio.us - Topics, not Facets

• High level topics - photography, news, education
• Get related terms by popularity, not conceptual
• Photography
• Synonyms - photo, photos
• Related art, design, images, camera
• Related Facet howto, tutorial, photoshop
• Popularity is not quality
• Dominance of computer terms
• Tyranny of the majority design (1 MIL),
  interior design 3,909
• Top 25 same set, slight order shift social
  inertia
• New terms - important iphone, ipod, .net,
  ebooks,facebook
• Dropped terms adult, babes, britney, naked,
  sex, sexy

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Del.icio.us - Folksonomy Findability

• Too many hits (where have we heard that before?)
• Design 1 Mil, software 931,259, sex 129,468
• No plurals, stemming (singular preferred)
• Folksonomy 14,073, folksonomies 3,843, both
  1,891
• Blog-1.7M, blogs 516,340, Weblog- 155,917,
  weblogs 36,434, blogging 157,922, bloging
  697
• Taxonomy 9.683, taxonomies 1,574
• Personal tags cool, fun, funny, etc
• Good for social research, not finding documents
  or sites
• How good for personal use? Funny is time
  dependent

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Del.icio.us - Improving the Quality

• Bundle tags if used?
• Types of relationships ubuntu tutorial,
  howto, reference, tips, install
• Ontology Clusters grow with people and software
• Taxonomy Clusters software Linux - ubuntu
• Add broad general taxonomy of most popular tags
• Tags as natural categories build up and down
• Start evolve a simple 2 level taxonomy
• People assign tags to a category, build numbers
• Evolve quality of tags and emerging structure of
  tags
• Preferred term popular (Blog/blogs
  Books/book)
• Add mechanisms rank tags, taggers, categories

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Enterprise Environment KM 2.0

• From internet to intranet weve done this
  before
• Remember early Intranets built on Internet model?
• Smaller content repositories, more coherent
• More precise targets specific documents (the
  official version) not web sites
• More formal from documents to publishing
  procedures
• More control of publishing corporate policy
• More options for tagging part of CM system,
  policy, dedicated editor team, reward system

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Semantic Infrastructure Solution

• What wont work
• Recommendations about count-non-count nouns or
  singular plural
• Link to online dictionary or Wikipedia extra
  work, whole focus is on ease of tagging any
  help has to be immediate and integrated - or
  done by a central group
• New Relationship of Center and Crowd
• Not top down or bottom up
• Interpenetration of opposites
• Integrated Solution Content Structures, People,
  Technology, Policies and Procedures

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Semantic Infrastructure People

• KM 2.0 (or 3.0?)
• KM always concerned with social aspects of
  knowledge
• New relationship of center and users more
  sophisticated support, more freedom, more
  suggestions, more user input
• - New roles for users (taggers, part of variety
  of communities both distributed and central)
• New roles for central create feedback system,
  tweak the evolution of the system, Develop
  initial candidates
• Communities of Practice apply to tagging,
  ranking
• Community Maps formal and informal
• Map tags to communities more useful suggestions
• Use tags to uncover communities (see tech SNA)

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Semantic Infrastructure - Technology

• Enterprise Content Management
• Place to add metadata of all kinds, not just
  keywords
• Policy support important, part of job
  performance
• Add tag clouds to input page
• More sophisticated displays
• Tag clouds mapped to community map
• Tag clusters, taxonomy location
• Semantic Software Inxight, Teragram etc.
• Suggest terms based on text, on tag clouds
• Social Networking add semantics
• SNA apply to people and tags
• KM platforms, COPs social tags

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Semantic Infrastructure Putting it all
togetherComplexity Theory and Folksonomies
Feedback

• Ranking Methods
• Explicit people rank directly
• Categories, tags, taggers
• Good tags, best bets for terms or categories?
• Implicit software evaluation, reverse relevance
• Ranking Roles
• Taggers everyone (rewards, make it easy and
  fun)
• Meta-taggers everyone (but levels of
  meta-taggers)
• Editors tagging system, integration with
  taxonomy, resolve disputes, Wikipedia model

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Content Structures Best of Both Worlds

• Start and end with a formal taxonomy / Ontology
• Findability vastly superior
• Communication with others share tags
• Take advantage of conceptual relationships
• Tagging experience folksonomies plus
• Users can type any word system looks it up
  plurals, synonyms, preferred terms, spelling
  variations
• Software suggestions based on content of
  bookmark, document and on popular user tags
  natural level not top down
• New terms flagged and routed to central team
• Facets for both things and documents (faceted
  taxonomy)
• Software suggests facet values, user override
• Cognitively simpler task than own value, complex
  hierarchy

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Conclusions Semantic Infrastructure for KM 2.0

• Folksonomies can help but they need help to
  evolve better quality
• Fundamental contradiction of ease of tagging and
  findability will limit usefulness of Internet
  folksonomies
• Enterprise (Intranets, KM) is where the benefits
  will happen
• Semantic Infrastructure solution (people, policy,
  technology, semantics) and feedback is best
  approach
• Evolve folksonomies, taxonomies, ontologies not
  central, top-down design
• Intelligent Design Darwin new job Taxonomy
  Gods

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Questions?

• Tom Reamytomr_at_kapsgroup.com
• KAPS Group
• Knowledge Architecture Professional Services
• http//www.kapsgroup.com