Background to the KIDMM conversation
Profound and qualitative changes have happened within the
last two decades in the scope of the use of computers to
manage information.
Consider, for example, texts (e.g. documents, books)...
Some 20 years ago, storing texts electronically was a
very unusual practice!
Documents and books lived in filing cabinets and libraries.
In so far as computers were involved in their management,
it was largely limited to library catalogue databases.
Now, billions of documents are online through the World Wide Web.
They are being joined there by other containers of information
and meaning — images, sound recordings, movies, simulations...
At first, computers were employed primarily for number-crunching.
Then they developed ‘data management’ capabilities.
Now they are ‘information and knowledge management’
tools as well.
In fact, many more computers are used today
to produce information resources, organise and store them,
search for them, retrieve, display and print them than
are used for more traditionally ‘computational’
purposes. Difficult issues of information management and interoperability
have become central to many major big-budget computing projects
(e.g. in health, government, science, education).
What are the general issues?
Everyone complains about infoglut. Not just that there
is so much information online, but that it is also badly organised
and hard to search for; that the free-text search methods of the
major search sites are insufficiently productive; that making sense
of mountains of information requires a lot of human attention and
that machines aren’t as able to help us as we’d like
them to.
Some people look to metadata as the solution.
In a sense, this is not much different from cataloguing —
as in a library or art collection. It’s a question
of classification and labelling. The value of metadata
is being recognised in various subject domains, such as
government, health, librarianship and archiving.
But in the context of a global Web, problems of classification
and labelling get a whole lot more problematic. Classification
schemes need to be interoperable across information
collections, and this raises issues of standards.
There need to be ways of translating classification terms
across different subject domains — or human languages.
Problems also occur in relation to building global network
indexes, when no one authority has the right (nor should they
have the right) to have write-access to the world’s
information resources. How can hypertext indexes be created
as overlay maps to the Web?
Convergent BCS SG interest, 2005–6
The growing employment of computers in the production and
management of information products has drawn the attention of
a number of groupings within the British Computer Society —
especially, a number of BCS Specialist Groups. Each group
has a slightly different angle on the subject, and we haven’t
often come together to share our different ‘takes’.
This became evident to us in the Electronic Publishing
Specialist Group in 2003, when our Chair, Dr David Penfold,
gave a talk at the BCS SG Assembly at Bletchley Park about
Metadata — a subject that has featured at many EPSG events.
A number of other SGs showed interest in the idea of a joint
meeting on the subject.
At another SG Assembly, in April 2005, during a discussion
of the BCS Forums, the suggestion was put forward that quite a
few SGs might share an overlapping interest in knowledge and
information management. The result of this was the collection
of a list of two dozen interested activists from across a dozen SGs,
and the start of an online e-list conversation provisionally
dubbed ‘KIMtec’ (Knowledge & Information
Management and Technology).
At the same time, we realised that there are other constituencies
with an interest in this topic — not only within the BCS, but
beyond (such as associations of librarians, information scientists,
information designers &c).
So, during the Autumn of 2005, the BCS-EPSG Committee took on
a commitment to push these conversations further, and the result
of this was the convening of the KIDMM workshop on 6 March 2006.
(The discussions on this day were recorded and written up in detail
and make interesting reading &150;
see here.)
After 6–3–06, an email community
Not long after the March 2006 workshop, an expanded email discussion
list for BCS-KIDMM was set up on the British academic JISCmail hosting
system. This has served as a mechanism for debate, for alerting each
other to issues in the news and forthcoming events, and to plan
activities. The list currently has over fifty members:
see here for details of membership.
A particularly pleasing aspect of the BCS-KIDMM list is the easy
way it has afforded communication between list-members who are members
of the BCS, and those who are not. Some of our non-BCS members from
the worlds of librarianship, information management and heritage have
made especially valuable contributions to the cobversation. This
would not have been possible if the e-list had been set up within
the ‘members-only area’ of the BCS Web site.
KIDMM in relation to the Synergy discussion in the BCS
At the Spring Specialist Groups Assembly of the BCS, a report
was presented from a BCS working party called ‘Synergy’
which, under the chairmanship of Glyn Hayes, had been considering
the relationship between the BCS’s Specialist Groups and its
Forums. This raised a new concept of ‘knowledge communities’
which might come into being within the BCS to promote sharing of
thinking and joint action around topics of common interest.
At this SG Assembly, and the Autumn 2006 one which followed it,
Assembly members made the point that KIDMM looked like being the
best possible candidate in the field for a nascent ‘knowledge
community’, and that it deserved to be supported.
Unfortunately these suggestions came at a time of financial
stringency for the BCS, the reasons for which need not be
gone into here; but nonetheless KIDMM was encouraged to put
up a work proposal and apply for some funding. Not, it should
be understood, on an ongoing basis, but as an ad-hoc project
organised on a ‘working group’ basis to develop and
deliver a set number of ‘deliverables’, as a kind of
pilot of knowledge community activity.
The current KIDMM project and plan of work
The project proposal which BCS ended up funding in a decision
in Spring 2007 has the following basic work-plan:
- a conference to be organised during 2007 to draw a wider
number and range of people into the KIDMM conversations,
and in particular to extend participation further within
the BCS;
- a travelling exhibition to be created, to raise the profile
of issues of data, information and knowledge management within
the BCS, and also to be made available to audiences outside the
BCS to demonstrate that the BCS is aware of and concerned with
these issues;
- the KIDMM Web site to be maintained and developed as a resource
to back up the conference and the exhibition;
- Conrad Taylor to serve as the Project Officer for this work-plan,
paid as a consultant for a fixed number of hours, to organise
the conference and to design and produce the exhibition;
- Ian Herbert to manage the project as its Chair, with an
advisory panel consisting of Nic Holt, John Lindsay and
David Penfold.
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