OPENING THE GATES TO INFORMATION COMMONS
(ShelfLife, No. 189 (January 13, 2005) ISSN 1538-4284
http://www.rlg.org)
While respecting the right of corporations to charge for information, some information professionals are calling for fewer restrictions on its distribution and are lobbying for, or actively participating in, the creation of "information commons" -- a new way of producing and sharing information, creative works and democratic discussions. Like information portals, these "commons" (drawn from the historical existence of the English commons -- pieces of land to which members of a community had specific rights of access) are digital repositories of thematically related information. The information may include everything from scholarly journals to information on knitting. However, instead of being run by corporations, they tend to be run in a collective manner by like-minded individuals -- associations or university departments for instance -- and they are accessible to all. Proponent Marjorie Heins, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer and founder of Free Expression Policy Project, doesn't support free distribution of all information; her main concern is the "copyright mentality" that sees media giants attempting to squeeze the last dollar out of all content they control "rather than striking a more reasonable balance between fair return for effort and tying up information... The balance has gone awry." (Information Highways Nov-Dec 2004)
http://www.econtentinstitute.org/issues/ISarticle.asp?id=157663&story_id=42354113250&issue=11012004&PC
From Preparing tomorrow’s professionals: LIS schools and scholarly communication:
How are LIS schools preparing tomorrow’s academic librarians to deal with the emerging changes in scholarly communication? What more can they do? In this brief overview, we will look first at specialized courses dealing with various aspects of scholarly communication that have been added to the curriculum in many schools. The next section will look at how existing courses have been modified to include scholarly communication. Finally, we will explore the benefits of field experience, graduate assistantships and participation in institutional projects.
The authors present some interesting insights about the type of current curricula throughout the US schools.
As a conclusion, I think that there should be a stronger emphasis on the role and the implication of digital libraries (DL) and open access (open content, open communication) in scholarly communication. Understanding DLs both as social as well as technological constructs is important because most of the scholarly communication is mediated through some flavor of DL. Knowledge about open access (and open content, open communication) is critical because as an actor in the web of scholarly communication, the concept of openness as related to content and access seems to be influencing and shifting the research focuses of many disciplines.
Similar entries:The magic that makes Google tick, an article worth reading if you are interested to learn how things work behind the scenes before and after you type your query into Google's search box.
Among the nicely said things in the article, here is a quote that is a bit sarcastic and arrogant:
The job is not helped by the nature of the Web. "In academia," said Hölzle, "the information retrieval field has been around for years, but that is for books in libraries. On the Web, content is not nicely written -- there are many different grades of quality."
Surely Google has done a lots of progress in implementing IR knowledge to a very practical problem, but isn't it a show or arrogance to claim that academia has not helped (directly or indirectly) Google with their search technology?
Similar entries:December's Issue of D-Lib Magazine brings and interesting article regarding the implication of RSS in the science and research publishing. The Role of RSS in Science Publishing is worth reading. Yet another practical example of how blogs have brought forth a tool that can change the nature of the web as it is traditionally known. Website are no longer the static domains, RSS helps the sites be distributed widely, most importantly as a two-way communication.
Similar entries:The following few paragraphs where prompted from a discussion with a colleague of mine about the philosophical link to/from information science.
Well, I think that any practical disciplines or field of study is definitely informed by some philosophical discourse, even when the discipline itself does not acknowledge it, or does not seem to see it. In this sense, the field of Information Science(s)/Studies seems to lack an acknowledged philosophical grounding, even thought there are some obvious links of philosophical discourse. Imagine, many books and articles regarding information science do not emphasize the philosophical links (or if they do, they do so scantly, superficially and individualistically), or just start with practical issues, as if the phenomena treated by information science become part of the discourse just like that? Part of the phenomena treated by a discipline or field of study do emerge from practical problem, however, we should not neglect the phenomena that could arise from the philosophical discourse. The philosophical link might not be an obvious one, or it might not seem as a valuable enterprise worth research, thus, what would be the point in pursuing such a link for scholarly work. However, there could as well be very beneficial links.
Understanding the philosophical fundamentals/groundings that have informed and are informing information science/studies (implicitly or explicitly) might lead to a better understanding of the common elements that give rise (or are constitutive elements) to the phenomena treated by information science, thus, might provide us with a more coherent framework to treat such phenomena... to be continued...
Similar entries:This paper (Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?) reports its findings that "freely available articles do have a greater research impact. Shedding light on this category of open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are both adopting open access practices and being rewarded for it."
The findings of this paper have just confirmed what seems to be an obvious argument: the more open the accessibility to articles is, the more they will be used, and thus they ought to have greater impact in research and practice.
An additional question that needs to be addressed in this context is the overall impact of articles published in open access journals. It is quiet possible that articles published in open access journals might be able to shift the focus of a discipline or a field of study because of their wider availability and accessibility.
Similar entries:From "Digital Information Will Never Survive by Accident”:
"Beagrie: In the right conditions papyrus or paper can survive by accident or through benign neglect for centuries or in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls for thousands of years. It takes hundreds of years for languages and handwriting to evolve to the point where only a few specialists can read them.
...
In contrast, digital information will never survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management. The information and the ability to read it can be lost in a few years. Storage media such as paper tape, floppy disks, CD-ROM, DVD evolve and fall out of use rapidly. Digital storage media have relatively short archival life-spans compared to other media. As the volumes, heterogeneity, and complexity of digital information grows this requirement for active management becomes more challenging and more critical to a wider range of organisations."
I already have a problem reading/opening some papers/files that I wrote during my undergrad studies using WordStar (or something similar) in a school computer lab.
Similar entries:A brief overview of Mayomi (an Online mind-mapping tool and community) reveals that ANT can be used to analyze and trace the connections between various elements/actors. As it can be observed from the first page, the elements are human and non-human, some task oriented, others action oriented, as well as social and information structures, etc, making it a good fit to be analyzed by the ANT framework, unless they were designed and developed based on the ANT framework and methodology. Hope to write more about this once I use the tool. A similar tool is FreeMind which I just installed.
Similar entries:Culture of secrecy hinders Africa's information society covers few interesting ways the mobile telephone technology is being used in Africa. It is evident in the article that the use of mobile technology is being redefined and continually socially constructed by the social and monetary resourced available.
Among the other interesting paragraphs, this one is really revealing:
"The worst thing is that it is a short step from a culture of withholding information to that of becoming information-blind. In other words, when we keep on withholding information, we end up being unable to produce information. We lose the culture of surveying, assessing, classifying – in brief, collecting as much information as possible and storing it in a standardized manner, making it available for use, not only to cater for current specific needs, but also for potential and future ones."
Along the lines of this article's argument, it can also be explained why text messaging is lagging in the US behind Europe and Asia. Most cell/mobile phone service plans in the US come with certain amount of 'free' minutes included in the plan. So, if you have free minutes to use, you use them first before sending any text messages, but also because the mobile telephone devices in the US market are less 'text messaging' friendly. In contrast, in Europe you pay for each minute you talk, and you use text messaging because it is cheaper than talking; thus the social co-construction of the mobile telephony service and the technology, and its use.
Similar entries:The following article Rules for a Complex Quantum World: An exciting new fundamental discipline of research combines information science and quantum mechanics presents a fundamental new way of looking at information science. As a framework in making, it builds upon Shannon's information theory and Buckland's "information-as-thing", as well as quantum physics. It appears that this approach is closer to physics than the contemporary information science studies that deal primarily with information from the meaning making viewpoint.
Could this pave the way for the groundwork towards the unified theory of information?
Similar entries:From Towards the Digital Aquifer: introducing the Common Information Environment:
Excerpts:
Google [1] is great. Personally, I use it every day, and it is undeniably extremely good at finding stuff in the largely unstructured chaos that is the public Web. However, like most tools, Google cannot do everything. Faced with a focussed request to retrieve richly structured information such as that to be found in the databases of our Memory Institutions [2], hospitals, schools, colleges or universities, Google and others among the current generation of Internet search engines struggle. What little information they manage to retrieve from these repositories is buried among thousands or millions of hits from sources with widely varying degrees of accuracy, authority, relevance and appropriateness.
...
This is the problem area in which many organisations find themselves, and there is a growing recognition that the problems are bigger than any one organisation or sector, and that the best solutions will be collaborative and cross-cutting; that they will be common and shared. The Common Information Environment (CIE) [3] is the umbrella under which a growing number of organisations are working towards a shared understanding and shared solutions.
Commenting on George Por's article, Steven Cohen discusses the value of blogging and other tools supporting collaboration in building a collective intelligence.
While we have many blogging and other social software tools that enable the 'creation' of the collective, how do we harness the "collective intelligence" once it is 'there'/'built'? It would seem that other tools would be needed to enable quick and relevant utilization of the collective intelligence. So far, it appears that the blogging tools have done a great job enabling the representation of the collective intelligence. They lack the function as enablers for utilizing the available collective knowledge.
It seems that the next wave of social network and collaboration tools will/should concentrate more on the function of finding relevant and appropriate 'intelligence' somewhere in the collective pool. Needless to say that search engines are not best suited for this type of activity since they concentrate primarily on topical relevance and do little to nothing about spatial, temporal, methodological, contextual, process, and task specific relevance.
Similar entries:By the way of Column Two I came across the following site that defines Shareability of information. Here is the definition provided at the above site:
"Shareability refers to the extent to which information is shareable. Information has high shareability if it is easy to share between different individuals without loss of fidelity. Shareability theory (Freyd 1983, 1990, 1993) proposes that internal (e.g. perceptual, emotional, imagistic) information often is qualitatively different from external (e.g. spoken, written) information, and that such internal information is often not particularly shareable. The theory further proposes that the communication process has predictable and systematic effects on the nature of the information representation such that sharing information over time causes knowledge to be re-organized into more consciously available, categorical, and discrete forms of representation, which are more shareable."
The distinction made above between internal and external information sounds almost exactly like the distinction made in the Knowledge Management (KM) discourse between tacit and explicit knowledge. Furthermore, the definition does not seem to make distinction between information and knowledge, even though such distinction appears to be very relevant in the context of the definition.
Another concern that might further help the above definition or the theory of shareability is to note that it is not the knowledge that is organizable, rather, it is mostly the representations of the explicit knowledge, and to a much lesser degree the representations of the tacit knowledge (if at all).
And one more thing, in the spirit of the concept of openness, for something to be shared it first must be open to change (open content) and the access to it must be also open.
Similar entries:Bo-Christer Björk: Open access to scientific publications - an analysis of the barriers to change?:
Abstract:
"One of the effects of the Internet is that the dissemination of scientific publications in a few years has migrated to electronic formats. The basic business practices between libraries and publishers for selling and buying the content, however, have not changed much. In protest against the high subscription prices of mainstream publishers, scientists have started Open Access (OA) journals and e-print repositories, which distribute scientific information freely. Despite widespread agreement among academics that OA would be the optimal distribution mode for publicly financed research results, such channels still constitute only a marginal phenomenon in the global scholarly communication system. This paper discusses, in view of the experiences of the last ten years, the many barriers hindering a rapid proliferation of Open Access. The discussion is structured according to the main OA channels; peer-reviewed journals for primary publishing, subject-specific and institutional repositories for secondary parallel publishing. It also discusses the types of barriers, which can be classified as consisting of the legal framework, the information technology infrastructure, business models, indexing services and standards, the academic reward system, marketing, and critical mass."
When discussing the subject of digital libraries (DLs), often the very definition and meaning of the phrase "digital library" is questioned. This is expected due to the historical, practical and theoretical development of digital libraries as technologies (computer and information systems) as well as social structures.
Below I provide two definitions by Borgman (1999) and Lesk (1997) that have been widely used by practitioners and researchers. Needles to say both definitions embody the technical and the social nature of digital libraries.
Borgman (1999) attempts to explicate the meaning and interpretation of the phrase "digital library" through the analysis of various definitions regarding "digital libraries" coined by various research and practice communities claming to be somehow related to digital libraries, and to assess and identify possible influences of those definitions in the relevant communities. Borgman identifies two distinct senses in which "digital library" has been used (p. 227). The technological definition stating that "digital libraries are a set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching and using information" (p. 234), is contrasted by the social view stating that "digital libraries are constructed, collected and organized, by (and for) a community of users, and their functional capabilities support the information needs and uses of that community" (p. 234).
Another workable and widely used definition is provided by Lesk (1997): "Digital libraries are organized collections of digital information. They combine the structuring and gathering of information, which libraries and archives have always done, with the digital representation that computers have made possible" (p. XIX).
References :
Borgman, C. L. (1999). What are digital libraries? Competing visions. Information Processing & Management, 35 (3), 227-243.
Lesk, M. (1997). Practical digital libraries: Books, bytes and bucks. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann
Similar entries:In Prediction Thijs van der Vossen has stated some ideas about how things will be in the future in terms of information and knowledge sharing.
While I agree that what Thij's writes is the desired outcome if we are doing towards a more open world, the outcome is not necessarily so. Yes, information needs to be free so it can be accessed from everywhere, by everyone, through many different devices and access methods. However, the assumption is that the corporate entities will be willing to let go the grip they have on everything information that looks profitable.
So, one of the fundamental assumptions is that all sources of information and knowledge artifacts really want to share their content. In the open source Internet as a possible antidote to corporate media hegemony I have argued that the property of openness (open content and open communication) as a fundamental property of the Internet as we know it today, is perhaps the reason why Thij's predictions look very probably. Hopefully no authoritative entity puts restrictions around what can be said and done online.
Similar entries:The idea that search engines (SEs) suppress controversy is indeed real. As it is argued in Do Web search engines suppress controversy?, the suppression is not intentional, however, Google's bottom line means good results and quicker, not necessarily attempting to cover all the sides of the story/issue which an information seeker is trying to find information about.
I've tried to explain the sort of mediating power/role by SEs in earlier blog entry: search engines' meaning mediation power,
Similar entries:Google does it again. Like with many of the practical implementations in the search world, Google is first again. First in implementing it in real world, not necessarily in research. As far as research is concerned, personalized searches have been discussed plenty.
This new personalized web search by Google utilizes facet aided searches.
The entire search is dynamic. Once you setup the profile, very simple and menu/directory driven, the left side shows the built query. You can still type a search term. The FAQ shows a bit how things supposed to work.
In any case, the search is operational (beta) and once the relevant docs are returned, there is a small sliding bar that can be moved left-right in order to dynamically relax-restrict the personalization.
Interesting stuff! Just when you think you have learned how Google works! :)
Now, all other search engines would try to do the same. Why don't they start something before Google does it for a change?! What are they afraid off?
(thanks to unstruct.org for the link)
Similar entries:An interesting reading from ShelfLife, No. 140 (January 22 2004), about How to Digitize Eight Million Books:
Similar entries:"HIGH-SPEED DIGITIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES
A robotic scanner, custom built for Stanford University, is systematically digitizing parts of the university library's vast collection -- over eight million volumes. Resembling a giant copier, the 4DigitalBooks robot quickly and automatically scans about 1,000 pages per hour -- a complete 300-page book in 20 minutes. Stanford University Librarian Michael Keller, who oversees the project, says, "It's rigorously consistent -- the page is always flat, the image is always good, and software conversion allows you to index the text so you can search it." Rare books, however, are another matter. "We're very concerned about (them), so we haven't put any manuscripts on the robot. Instead, we use a technology based on the same cameras, (but turn) the pages by hand." In the next 10 to 20 years, Keller believes more and more information will be presented in digital form. "I suspect books will continue to be useful and important, and we'll (still) see them published. But people will find more and more of their information online, and the number of books will decrease." Stanford, for instance, is planning a science and engineering library whose goal is to have no books on the shelves. "We'll still need physical libraries," says Keller, "because people want to meet with one another. They want to work on
projects collaboratively, and they also like to work in clusters and groups." (The Book & The Computer 15 Dec 2003) http://www.honco.net/os/index.html"
The following paragraph is an excerpt from my previous blog entry (Actor-Network Theory and Managing Knowledge), triggered for repetition after I read James Robertson's Making meaning who refers to Denham Grey's share meaning.
The excerpt:
Next, I would like to demonstrate the naming and the power of the semantic tool with two examples reflecting from my personal experience upon embarking on the Ph.D. program. First, I would like to describe the performative power of the marks I inscribe on the pages of articles and books I read for my classes. Usually, at the start of a new article, more so if the article presents concepts that I perceive unfamiliar, my red pen inscribes all sorts of marks (stars, checks, circles, question marks, exclamation marks, underlining, etc.) with their intended and perceived importance. The first run through the article produces a set of marks placed mostly in the sidelines of article’s pages, each of them with their perceived meaning of what I think is important and necessary for me to master the ideas presented therein, or because I believe that a particular quote will be useful later on. At times I wonder if I’m overdoing with these marks as the more I inscribe they tend to loose their relative significance. The topology of the marks on the pages would have been much different (in relations to each other as well as their quantity) had I had some prior understanding about marks’ meanings. Nevertheless, the point I’m stressing is that the marks tell me different things the next time I look at them for just making sure I have understood a concept or for review purposes. Sometimes I even wonder why have I underlined a certain sentence. At other times I discover that I have missed a certain concept. However, the result is that these entities have performed on my knowledge structure and have also been performed upon themselves, as some of them do not carry the same meaning I attached to them at the time of inscription. The topology in this case would be the article with its marks and also my knowledge structure. However, the article is also part of other topologies, such as the set of articles written by the same author, the set of articles contained in the journal it was published, the disciplines or studies it was intended to perform upon, etc. In my case the marks have performed mostly vertically (affecting my knowledge structure). They probably would not mean much to anyone else, unless I write a page of rules and guidelines describing the marks together with their intentions as I perceived them. But this would be a very hard task because they might not be of much benefit to others given the personal performative nature. (Full article)
Similar entries:Interesting development regarding this software. In New 'NBOR' Software to Debut Next Month Yahoo reports:
"A few hundred thousand lines of computer code could revolutionize the way people interact with computers, say its unlikely inventor and his backers."
"... includes an intuitive user interface for writing, drawing, compiling multimedia presentations and other PC tasks. It allows real-time collaboration and sends large files over the Internet at lightning speed."
Nothing new so far. Sound like just a hype... BUT, you never know. One point of skepticism is the claim to 'intuitivety'. Many have said this before... Also, it appears to be an all-in-one solution and so far such applications have not been very successful in being adopted by the wider public. Let’s wait and see...
Similar entries:I had come across few times before on pieces describing the potential of PowerPoint to dumb-down people's way of thinking. The same is suggested in the following CNN article Does PowerPoint make us stupid?.
That technology affects social structures and other social phenomena (personal and/or at the levels of society) is widely acknowledged, and perhaps is hard to argue otherwise. These effects are not necessarily negative or positive. The effects depend on the context, i.e. the contextual imbedness of the technology within the social structures. (more about social constructionism vs. technological determinism)
Does PowerPoint (as a technology) have the same capability? Surely. However, to what extend is it able to effect individual’s way of thinking as far as presentation of information and facts are concerned? Just because it affects an individual it does not mean it has an affect on all faculties of reasoning and thinking of that individual. It can be argued that it does, however, one needs to be cautious not to jump to quick conclusions without the proper research and deeper understanding of the situation.
Like any other technology, PowerPoint tries to simplify 'things'. In the process of simplification the complexity of the context (including the content and the social structures) is usually 'relaxed' and many details are lost. I would argue that this is rather an unfortunate situation because each simplification chips little by little out of the reality which is not necessarily simple. Thus, as a result many complex phenomena are simplified to a great extent, up to a point where a new phenomenon is 'born' because the simplification really dumbed the complex phenomenon to an unrecognizable one.
Whether the above reasoning is true for PowerPoint's ability to dumb us down is another matter. If it is true, I would suggest that the context is also responsible and not PowerPoint alone. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the scope as to how wide is this even practically possible. Theoretically one can argue that an element in a socio-technological context can have extensive effect in terms of time and space/distance. Practically, it should be analyzed whether the element, PowerPoint in this case, is first and foremost able to effect the individual beyond the presentation mode thinking, or does it also effect individual's other intellectual faculties. (more on Actor-Network Theory and Managing Knowledge)
Maybe it is the immediate relevant context (organization, corporation, society, etc) that has been dumbed-down enough that simple presentation tools like PowerPoint suffice? Or is it PowerPoint? I would think it is both to some extend: complex thoughts, ideas, and solutions are hard to present in their complexity in the expected 30-45 minutes timeframe usually allocated for presentation to managers. That is why we have journal articles and research papers.
Similar entries:In To much information Nathan Cochrane makes a good point that despite the multitude of tools at our disposal that manage and manipulate information we have not necessarily become more informed decision makers. Perhaps the evens and issues we need to make informed decision have become so complex that the current tools (based on the utilitarian theoretical foundations) do not help us much.
Similar entries:Who Owns The Facts?
(courtesy of slashdot)
Quote:
"windowpain writes "With all of the furor over the Patriot Act a truly scary bill that expands the rights of corporations at the expense of individuals was quietly introduced into congress in October. In Feist v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. the Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be copyrighted. But H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act neatly sidesteps the copyright question and allows treble damages to be levied against anyone who uses information that's in a database that a corporation asserts it owns. This is an issue that crosses the political spectrum. Left-leaning organizations like the American Library Association oppose the bill and so do arch-conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who wrote an impassioned column exposing the bill for what it is the week after it was introduced."
From On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral on the fluidity of URLs and their movement, displacement, and disappearance:
(thanks to slashdot for this reference)
"Problem was, it took about two years for the article to wind its way to publication. And by that time, many of the sites they had cited had moved to other locations on the Internet or disappeared altogether, rendering useless all those Web addresses -- also known as uniform resource locators (URLs) -- they had provided in their footnotes."
I think the problem was perhaps with reliance on those URLs knowing that they can not be relied for an extended period of time.
"Dellavalle's concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival."
It isn't the medium; it is the not so rigorous self discipline of individuals who put serious and valuable scholarly material on websites that are not maintained.
This is why 'permalinks' used by bloggers are so great.
Further, I would like to stress that the problem is not with the internet as a publishing medium, rather with the publishing strategies followed by self publishers. Self archiving could effectively resolve this problem. Or, even better, a publishing framework like MIT's and HP's DSpace that cares tremendously about preservation and permanency of locations. Another such digital library system that can be used to preserve publications and URLs is Greenstone.
Similar entries:From Global society and knowledge-driven education:
Quotes:
"There is overall agreement that various historical transformations are taking place and that in their own way these steps are creating their own dynamics in the process of evolution of the social framework. There is consensus that this inter-action is leading to divergence as well as convergence amid all the changes. The principle of obtaining shared knowledge and the learning process itself, while augmenting mutual growth and understanding, are also creating distinctions. This is partially because global society is not always promoting equitable chances and opportunities for human welfare and there is absence of orderly interaction and sustained cooperation to reduce uncertainties and inconveniences at the global level."
"Knowledge based education has now become central to the creation of the intellectual capacity on which knowledge production and utilisation depend. We have to promote lifelong-learning practices and update knowledge and skills if we are to retain competitive advantage. Traditional institutions have an important role to play in this regard. They have to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the new information and communications technologies. Failure to do so will mean the widening of the digital divide that is facing most of the developing countries, particularly the low-income countries."
Similar entries:I've been puzzled for some time as to what is meant by the "semantic web" phrase and what does it mean in practice and research. I've come across the following article The Semantic Web, today that appears to be describing the semantic web concept(s) in a clear and presentable way.
The article makes the following distinction:
"The key point of the semantic web is the conversion of the current structure of the web as a data storage (interpretable only by human beings, that are able to put the data into context) into a structure of information storage."
I can understand the above intention and the attempt to make a distinction between data and information. However, the distinction between data and information that we make in our heads and understanding does not mean much to computer software.
Further, the article states:
"The Semantic Web is based on two fundamental concepts: 1) The description of the meaning of the content in the Web, and 2) The automatic manipulation of these meanings."
As far as 1) is concerned, the description itself is just another data (or information), i.e. metadata (or metainformation). In any case, the proper software tools have to be build to 'understand' the metadata/metainformation.
As far as 2) is concerned and the manipulation of meanings, this is a bit skeptical because to the machines, as I've tried to explain elsewhere here and here, those descriptions are just data it can manipulate and not meanings.
No, I don't believe that metadata and metainformation will not be able to provide a level of quality in the process of information seeking and access to information, I'm just a bit skeptical about the hype and high level of optimism that the semantic web will deliver us from the chaos of the web.
An interesting parallel are the natural languages. Each language is composed of words and phrases that have certain meaning(s) and/or concepts attached to them. To be able to navigate within the conceptual space of the language (i.e. understand the language) one needs to learn what each of the words represents: because each word or phrase is a metadata/metainformation for the actual concept in the particular language. So, it is good to be optimistic that eventually we'll come around to be able to represent the vast and chaotic multitude of information on the web with a set of metadata/metainformation and ontologies that all software will 'understand'.
Well... Esperanto hasn't yet become the world language it was meant to be... And it does not seem that it will became anytime soon... And even if it does, there still will be multiple meanings for various phrases...
Similar entries:HOW MUCH INFORMATION 2003? is an interesting study trying to estimate the amount of new information (i.e. information-as-thing) created each year. It is important to note the emphasis on information-as-thing in this study.
From the page:
Similar entries:"This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year. Newly created information is distributed in four storage media – print, film, magnetic, and optical – and seen or heard in four information flows – telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows. Where reliable data was available we have compared the 2002 findings to those of our 2000 study (which used 1999 data) in order to identify trends – recognizing that 1999-2002 were years of relatively low economic activity. The 2000 study is located on the Web at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/. Note that this – the 2003 study – has revised certain of the 1999 estimates when we have found new and better data sources."