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Sports & Taxonomies: More Related Than You May Think
Earlier this year, you may recall, we demonstrated the far-reaching and all-encompassing nature of taxonomies when we highlighted the taxonomical approach sportswriters apply to making preseason baseball predictions in Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball. With the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympic Games, we could not pass up the opportunity to once again share some insights into two of our favorite things—sports and taxonomies!
Read MoreGeneral Approaches to Creating a Taxonomy
There are several ways to create a taxonomy. One is from the existing data, which is my preferred method. You can also do it as an intellectual outline of the discipline, thinking about what ought to be included in this discipline. That is what the monks did many years ago in their cold towers on those mountainsides. Few of us have that luxury. Most of us will be dealing with a specific corpus of information.
Read MoreMetadata Focus and Depth
A taxonomy provides a way to describe content. It is a source of conceptual descriptions for filling the subject metadata field in database records. When you look at a metadata schema, regardless of who built it, there is some field or element specified for the description of the concept represented in the item. It might be called the subject, descriptor, keyword, or something else. Dublin Core is one of the well-known metadata schemas. (To my mind it is not fully a standard; even though you will find my name on the standard for Z39.84, I still think it is just a guideline.)
Read MoreSemantic Networks
Semantic networks provide structure to a set of concepts, as a network or a web. They are often defined as graph representations of the relationships among a set of concepts. In a larger sense, in the world of computer science, they are a set of concepts with relationships that are defined in such a way that computers, or the World Wide Web, can work with those relationships.
Read MoreThe Meanings of Ontology
Ontologies are the newest label attached to knowledge organization systems (KOSs). They are generally specific modules and models developed by the knowledge management community. Stanford University has developed an ontology software called Protégé, which people seem to either love or hate. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground. They are either very fond of it: “Oh, I just love Protégé!”; or they hate it: “I don’t understand that tool; it doesn’t make any sense to me.” I don’t know which class you will fall into, but it is open source software and it is available. So, try it out and make your own decision.
Read MoreThoughts on the Mobile Transition
Recently, Jenn Webb interviewed Josh Marinacci, an expert on user interfaces and on Java development. The interview, “Josh Marinacci: 90% will rely on mobile, but 10% will still need desktops”, focused on the nature of the transition from reliance on full-size desktop and laptop devices to use of smaller devices for some of the same purposes.
Read MoreThoughts on ORCID
A new and powerful tool is headed our way. I believe it has the potential to change the way we interact with researchers, contributors and authors in general.
I have already reported on the Contributor ID meeting in Boston mid-May. One of the main reasons for the timing of that meeting was the ORCID Outreach meeting to be held at the Microsoft office next to MIT in Cambridge. The aim of ORCID is to “solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a registry of persistent unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID, other ID schemes, and research objects such as publications, grants, and patents.”
Read MoreOf Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball
Baseball and biology are not commonly found in the same conceptual space. Neither do you find taxonomy associated with baseball, but in recent news these connections were made. Grant Bisbee, editor of “Baseball Nation”, digresses into the arcane as he laments the coming of the “He’s In the Best Shape of His Life” season. This is the time of year baseball writers must assess the prospects for the coming season, and clichés and hyperbole reign. The dubious practice of evaluating the physical condition of players runs rampant as spring training begins. With tongue in cheek, Bisbee tries to shape a taxonomy to classify this spring ritual. His would be the taxonomy of the “In the Best-shape Stories”.
Read MoreAuthor Contributions – A Confusing and Imprecise Science
In Boston on May 16 at Harvard University, The Wellcome Trust hosted the International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution. Several presenters outlined other roles we should probably begin to acknowledge and what those roles are. Over the last two weeks I reported on some of the talks made at the workshop. This is the final summary from that meeting.
Ginny Barbour is the chief editor of PLOS Medicine for the well-known Public Library of Science (PLoS). Her talk was on “PLOS: Big science and medicine and the attribution of authorship.” She pointed out that past solutions for author attribution do not work. Big science and the accompanying data sets create new attribution problems. “We have been trying to solve the wrong problem” she said.
Read MoreGiving Credit
While watching the end of a movie last night to see where exactly it was filmed, I paid attention to the credits. Coming from a publishing perspective, I tried matching what they list to what we capture about the author, researcher, and creator in a bibliographic citation. What are the matches? The film lists the animation team, the animal handlers, the costume designers, the makeup artists, the photographers, the accounting team, and on and on and on. There are hundreds of people behind the scenes, and they are all listed in the credits. What do we list for a team of 3000 researchers working on a big data project? We cite a few authors with a spare affiliation line and an acknowledgement to the funders. What about the rest of the contributors? Are there others that should be cited?
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