Monday, March 17, 2003

The unending search for metadata Towards structured blogging Sebastien Paquet: "Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily." [via Werblog]   This piece by Sebastien is right on the money in terms of goals and aims, but I believe extremely difficult to implement.  This paragraph says it all: Now to generalize. I talked about music reviews, but the scheme should also work with other kinds of content. Music video reviews, movie reviews (using IMDB?), ad reviews, TV show reviews, game reviews, radio station reviews, weblog reviews, restaurant reviews (perhaps using GPS data), scholarly article reviews... other kinds of content that are not reviews also, such as song lyrics, TV show transcripts, quotes, self-identification data. What at first feels achievable -- e.g. an artist database / topic tree that can be mapped to blog content about music -- quickly spins out of control into many, many diverse topic trees.  Should the author use just the artist database, or also tag the content to the song lyric DB, the music video DB, etc.    I've been involved in implementing meta-data systems for content management applications, and have never seen it work -- not even once -- for basic end-user content contributors.  It's a noble goal, but still seems to me intractable for now. 10:19:56 AM    comment []

WiFi Phones Instat predicts the voice over wireless LAN market will grom from $16.5 million in 2002 to $507 million in 2007. [via Werblog] Who's going to have the first reasonable WiFi/VoIP phone that I can use in my home and take with me to hotspots?  Will it just be my PocketPC? 10:12:09 AM    comment []

Over-the-Wire Analytics The conversational enterprise Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they'll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents. Full story at InfoWorld.com As usual, Jon has provocative analysis regarding the evolving ability to harvest knowledge from business and social processes.  I've been looking into this space lately and am extremely excited by the fact that over-the-wire transparency made possible by sturctured data (XML/RSS/WSDL/SOAP) radically opens up our ability to harvest, analyze and understand social and business processes.  In the past, this kind of real-time analytics were too expensive and too invasive.  Good stuff. 9:54:07 AM    comment []