Knowledge, information, data
and metadata management

Towards making knowledge in communities – by Conrad Taylor
Within the British Computer Society, the term ‘knowledge community’ has come into use, without it being very clear what it means. Conrad looks at the intersect between theories of knowledge management, and Etienne Wenger’s popular concept of ‘Communities of Practice’, with its emphasis on the negotiation of meaning through interlocked processes of participation and reification. If a knowledge community is a grouping that bends consciously towards sharing observations and opinions and ideas with the aim of eliciting shared and shareable knowledge, what are the processes of participation and reification involved, and how can they be improved?

A five-page paper prepared for distribution at the BCS Specialist Groups Assembly, April 2008, as PDF.

Brainstorm chart: a one-page brainstorm diagram also distributed at the April 2008 SG Assembly. This presents ideas for improving ‘participation’ on the left and those for improving ‘reification’ on the right. However, Web sites organised as knowledge communities are capable of supporting both participation and reification.

Metadata, solution or distraction? – by Conrad Taylor
On 23 May 2007, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) held a one-day conference, Search Solutions. Conrad Taylor gave a presentation explaining the role that metadata can play in preparing information resources for more accurate discovery an retrieval, and the difficulties that can arise in doing so. IRSG is committed to making as many as possible of the presentations available, together with MP3 recordings.

Here are Conrad’s presentation slides as annotated PDF (2.6 MB, compatible with Acrobat 5 & above).

And here is Conrad’s talk as an MP3 file (22 mins, 9.3 MB).

Metadata’s many meanings and uses – by Conrad Taylor
A 21-page briefing paper in which Conrad explores how ‘metadata’ means different things to data managers on the one hand, and publishers and librarians on the other. The history of this is explained, with examples, and the paper concludes with an exposition of the various technologies and standards employed in implementing discovery metadata.

Download Metadata’s many meanings and uses as PDF (1.5 MB).

Report of the 6 March 2006 KIDMM discussion workshop
An extensive account of the presentations and discussions from the 6 March 2006 KIDMM workshop, prepared by Conrad Taylor from audio recordings and wallcharts. This is available in PDF form from it’s own page.

Nic Holt on Search & Categorisation Technologies
Seven pages of notes from Nic Holt FBCS — a personal view of different approaches that can be taken, with mention of companies whose technologies take these various approaches. This is a PDF and is compatible with Acrobat Reader 4.x and above.

Comput*, by John Lindsay
An essay by John Lindsay in response to the KIDMM meeting and the introductory paper prepared for it by Conrad Taylor. This was circulated on 9th May 2006 to the KIDMM email discussion list. It is not quite complete but we are posting it here, as a print-friendly Web page, as a discussion resource.

Metadata Update
On 19 April 2006 at the Specialist Groups Assembly of the British Computer Society, Dr David Penfold spoke briefly about discussions about metadata within the BCS: more specifically about (a) how a taxonomy for content within the BCS Web site is being implemented and (b) the KIDMM initiative, the 6 March KIDMM meeting and the proposed ideas for carrying the discussion forward into action.

Here you can access a PDF of David’s slides for that talk, and also an edited audio recording of the talk, in MP3 format.

‘Dissecting our information society’
This article by Dr David Penfold was published in the BCS Review 2004, and is based on the talk about the role of metadata in information architecture which he gave to the BCS Specialist Groups Assembly at Bletchley Park in April 2003. (It was following this talk that discussions first started about SG common interests around information and knowledge management.)

KIDMM background briefing from Conrad Taylor
This is the version 2.1 of a paper written by Conrad Taylor after the Spring 2005 Specialist Group Assembly of the BCS, circulated in May 2005, and expanded and amended in February 2006 to include some discussion of Ontologies and Topic Maps.

Written admittedly from a publishing-oriented point of view, this paper is an attempt to trace the process whereby computers have developed into tools for producing, storing and transmitting information products (receptacles of knowledge, largely text-based) and various methods that have been tried to ‘get a better handle’ on information — including generic markup, free-text search, inverted-tree indexing, metadata, Dublin Core, metadata interoperability, Resource Description Framework, ontologies and topic mapping.

Conrad hopes that this may provide an initial briefing for people new to this field, and provided it as one of the starting points for discussion and debates at the 6 March 2006 KIDMM workshop.

The document has 39 A4 pages including cover and is in PDF format, compatible with Acrobat readers version 3.0 and above. Filesize slightly over 1000 Kb.
[ Download... ]

Reactions to the first version of the above paper
When the first version of Conrad’s discussion paper was released in May 2005, there were a few extended comments which you may wish to read. One was from Tony Jenkins from the perspective of the Data Management SG, and resulted in our incorporating ‘Data’ into the title of the discussion; another was from Berin Gowan and among other things discussed the experience of ‘database publishing’; and a third was from Martin Bryan, who picked up on some of Berin’s comments, and spoke of complexities caused by multiplicities of uses that cannot be foreseen when information is being captured and encoded and indexed.

Glossary relating to thesauri and other forms of structured vocabulary for information retrieval — compiled by Dr Leonard Will MBCS. A useful resource compiled with the help of Stella Detre Clarke, Alan Gilchrist and Ron Davies.

Ontologies and the Semantic Web — lecture by Professor Ian Horrocks
Ian Horrock of Manchester University delivered the 2005 Roger Needham Lecture to a BCS audience at the Royal Society. Ian explained the thinking behind the Semantic Web and the need for semantic mark-up; the deficiencies of RDF Schema; and how 15+ years of work in knowledge representation formalisms (ontologies, knowledge bases and description logics) have informed the development of OWL, the Web Ontology Language, now a W3C recommendation. Illustrated account of the lecture prepared by Conrad Taylor in collaboration with Ian Horrocks; available now as a PDF download, filesize 544kb.

Web intelligence — article by Professor Nigel Shadbolt
Based on a lecture to the British Computer Society and the Royal Signals Institution, this article discusses the role that Artificial Intelligence can play in managing information on the web, and how this dovetails with initiatives such as RDF metadata, ontologies and so on. Nigel Shadbolt is Professor at Southampton University, is director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies project, and will be the next President of the BCS.

From data storage to information retrieval — article by Tony Rose
This article by the Vice-Chair of the Information Retrieval Specialist Group reviews the problem of how the huge volumes of data online can be managed. Discusses structures vs. unstructured data – current retrieval practice of search engines such as Google – the role of natural language processing – future directions.

Liz Orna on ‘Making Knowledge Visible’
A talk given on 1 Nov 2005 by Liz Orna, author of Making Knowledge Visible, at a meeting organised by BCS-EPSG. Liz discusses knowledge and information management and the crucial role of ‘information products’ in storing and transmitting knowledge. She also argues for a triple alliance of information managers, ICT specialist and information designers.
Audio recording available for download.
(1 hr, 4 mins; 26.2 Mbytes as MP3, 15.2 Mbytes as AAC)

Discovery Metadata — reports of EPSG April 2003 meeting
A page linking to brief reports by Michael Upshall of BCS-EPSG, about ten talks by Stella Dextre Clark (e-Envoy’s office), Barry Kruger (BECTA), Margaret Hanley (BBC), Alpay Beler (Science Museum), Gina Fullerlove (McMillan), Norman Paskin (DOI Foundation), Alan Turner (Somerset Computing), John Darlington (Active Navigation), Judi Vernau (TSO) and Mark Alcock (Fretwell Downing).

‘Metadata and World Development’ — 12 May 2004
This was a one-day conference hosted by the (now-defunct) BCS Developing Countries Specialist Group, to investigate a possible role for metadata in meeting the UN Millenium Goals on development and poverty eradication. Several papers were circulated in advance of that meeting which are pertiment to the KIDMM discussion.

Metadata, e-government and the language of democracy [PDF] — Danny Budzak describes work carried out EIDISS (Integrated Electronic Democracy Information and Support Systems), an e-government project. The metadata workstream of EIDISS studied terminology used to describe local democracy, and found that citizens had difficulty understanding what these terms meant.

Organising knowledge resources for health, empowerment & development [PDF] — Conrad Taylor explores how information for development may be better organised and made easier to search for and retrieve. Free text searches, structured document formats, added metadata, user interfaces to search systems and applications of artificial intelligence are all considered. Conrad also speculates about how server-hosted electronic information might be searched without a Web connection where this is impossible or costly, and flags a role for ‘social software’ in enabling the building of knowledge networks for development.

Health Informatics in the UK
A talk given at the BCS Specialist Groups Assembly in April 2004 by Ian Herbert, BCS Health Informatics Committee, about the UK government’s drive to computerise the National Health Service, using among other techniques controlled vocabularies to promote interoperability between different parts of the hospital system and GP practices.
MP3 audio recording available for download.
(18 mins, 23 secs; 3.3 Mbytes)

Artificial Intelligence SG and its concerns
A talk given at the BCS Specialist Groups Assembly in April 2004 by Ron Milne, Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence. Includes a review of ‘what’s hot’ is AI research and practical applications today — and many of these applications are about information retrieval, data mining, ‘intelligent agents’ on the Web and so on.
MP3 audio recording available for download.
(14 mins, 23 secs; 2.7 Mbytes)