KIDMM: Knowledge, information,
data & metadata management

Documents: Comment from Berin Gowan

The following comment is from Berin Gowan of the Electronic Publishing SG and was sent as a reaction to the original (April 2005) version of Conrad Taylor’s discussion paper. Berin has a great deal of experience in issues of information architecture and database publishing. See also the response from Martin Bryan.

Databases in publishing; engineering issues

I apologise that it has taken some time to respond to [Conrad’s original KIMtec paper], especially as it was intended to initiate conversation. My only excuse is that such an excellent foundation paper did warrant a period of reflection before offering any counterbalancing contributions.

You rightly point out your bias towards electronic publishing in approaching the overlapping topic of information management. Your focus has been on narrative texts with occasional references to image libraries – but there is a largely unreported area where the two topics find greater mutual interest.

Catalogues, directories, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, timetables etc have drawn on both disciplines for many years. The challenge has been to devise editorial environments for sustaining such information to a high standard of integrity, to configure databases to host that material, and to build middleware both to service the editorial process and to drive the compilation processes that deliver multiple information products and services.

This world of database-driven publishing provided some of the technology and most of the experience required for bringing a wider range of databases to the web. The publishing databases were largely purpose-built – but many of those subsequently published on the web were created for limited internal purposes and have needed even more middleware to render them anything like suitable for a wider audience.

Engineering issues

This opens up the issue of different information types, repositories and supporting structures such as indexes and cross-references. If you look, for example, at the Early Day Motions on http://edmi.parliament.uk/edmi you will see the narrative texts of the motions supported by a thesaurus; MPs as signatories listed by name, party, constituency; even a league table of the number of motions they have signed. There are a host of supporting facilities for filtering and sorting, and for handling such specific features as motions that propose amendments to previous motions. As you can imagine, this interface is rather different to the one for accepting new motions from MPs, and for MPs to add their signature to an existing motion.

Although it is a very old site it does highlight the problem of individual handling of unique datasets. This, I suspect, is why it is quite difficult to get to grips with this whole topic and why all-encompassing content management systems offered as generic solutions inadvertently provide a degree of concealment.

I would not wish to pollute your lucid paper with these more complex and hybrid engineering issues, particularly as so much publishing is still narrative texts and images. But it would be good to open up even more the question of information management and design as it applies within a system as much as it appears externally.

Berin Gowan, Electronic Publishing SG
and Knowledge Services Board