Phil, Chris,
I have read through your comments and have a question for you. First
up, a bit about myself.
I work for an organsiation that undertakes research for the UK MOD.
We advise them on technology issues, and my areas of interest are
info and knowledge management and business modelling (processes, data
and systems).
The question follows on from Chris' comment about dogs and canines.
In our user domain we cannot entertain the chance that a user might
be confused as to the meaning of a word, or a class or an object, or
a facet, or a topic or a ... you get the point. As such, explicit
semantic markup is essential, and this markup has to come from a
controlled vocabulary. If user A calls it a dog, and user B a hound,
the potential exists for confusion. Similarly, and more importantly
is the issue of polysemy. When I say 'tank' do I mean armoured
vehicle, petrol container in a car, glass bowl with fish in it, and
so on. The issue of controlled vocabularies is one that we are
restling with.
The use of these vocabularies also needs attention. So as to promote
consistency of use, we have to mandate a metadata set that all users
must adopt. When describing 'stuff' I want to be sure that all users
describe it in terms of its name, its size, its location, etc. This
is important so that as a user, I know that if I search for some
stuff using the metadata type and a controlled vocab value, I will
either get some stuff back, or not (because there is nothing declared
with that vocab term).
So there you have it, metadata sandards (centrally controlled) are
mandatory, as are controlled vocabularies.
The question is - do faceted taxonomies help me achieve my aim more
than topic maps, RDF, or other richer ontological markup? Would the
extensiblity of XFML create an uncontrolled chaotic environment in
which many user taxonomies had to be mapped to many other user
taxonomies (the n-squared problem)?
Also, XFML promo blurb (and the XML.com article) suggests that two of
the motivations behind XFML was that finding info was difficult as it
was poorly structured and the search facilities were poor. The
implication being that because searching technology was so poor, it
was necessary to define a new way of classification, not improve the
way we search. Is this understanding correct? If so, why not
address the searching problem first?
Apologies for such base questions, but I would appreciate some
comment from those more experienced in XFML.
Cheers,
Matt.
--- In [email protected], "Phil Murray"
<pmurray@K...> wrote:
> Chris et al. --
>
> The NMZ demonstrations are cool.
>
> The "Exact" match vs. "Default" match distinction is very useful,
and it
> raises a related question about online implementations of faceted
schemas.
> (I understand "exact" matches as hits on only that concept, but not
its
> children. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
>
> But how should the inverse case be handled? For example, an
information
> seeker wants information about "dogs" but the indexer has
classified a
> document under "canines." This is the classic retrieval problem of
indexers
> using broader or narrower indexing terms than the information seeker
> expects. It's unavoidable.
>
> In such cases ...
>
> -- Is making the schema visible sufficient? (In which case, you see
the
> broader/parent category.)
>
> -- Should you prioritize hits by the number of additional steps
necessary to
> crawl up a facet hierarchy? Display the additional jumps required?
> (MultiCentrix offers a feature along this line.)
>
> -- Should you use a percentage-based weighting scheme ... with
lesser weight
> given to those hits that require additional crawling of the facet
> hierarchies? (This may offer the advantage of simplicity for the
information
> seeker.)
>
>
> It would also be interesting to understand your thought processes
as you
> developed the schema for the acts of parliament example. Did you
draw on
> existing classification schemas, or did you do the facet analysis
from the
> ground up?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Phil
>
> > We built a software demonstrator that is still
> > running at Bristol at http://nzm.dig.bris.ac.uk. There are three
> > demonstrations at this site advertisements for cars, legislation
> > from the UK parliament and papers from an academic conference
> > (confidentiality with our collaborators prevents use of
engineering
> > examples).
>
> > Chris McMahon
>
>
> -------------------------------------------
> "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have
> not had the time to make it shorter."
> -- Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, 1657
>
> Phil Murray -- Chief Knowledge Architect
> The Knowledge Management Connection | http://www.KMconnection.com
> 401-247-7899
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