Enterprise Metadata Blog by R. Todd Stephens

Todd has got a nice mix of enterprise metadata from both theory and practice since he did his dissertation at the same as working at Bell South on real enterprise metadata needs. He has presented at several conferences involving both the more techie stuff at DAMA International as well as Dublin Core and other related conferences. I believe this intesection of the techie/practical world and the theory/academic world gives us a good mix of the challenges we face at managing information systems. He's definitely in the mix of things I'd like to be involved. It will be interesting to see where his blog goes in sharing his experiences. Many of his previous presentations and handouts are also available on his site.

Not all metadata are created equal as I learned last year when I attended the Wilshire Metadata & DAMA International Conference in Orlando, FL. However, when I sat in their meetings and learned this new aspect of metadata I discovered that there are some similarlities of concern, basically information organization, management, access, and retrievable.

If you come from the database modeling/administration world, I hear this is their equivalent to the IA Summit or CHI. The 2004 just concluded in Los Angeles. Their trip report is very informative, with enough information to get you to dig into new ways of thinking about information management.

Wilshire Metadata & DAMA International Conference 2004 Trip Report

First we had Don Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things(aka Design of Everyday Things) and now we have Stanford Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing How Everyday Things are Made. I wasn't going to contribute this item but I started thinking about how someone would view the UE/IA practice and try to create a video describing how a website/web application is developed. For instance, how do we describe to our parents what we do for a living. At least people in the various industries profiled in this educational site would have something to show & tell about their work to the common person. Do we have an equivalent?

So are we really a sum of all our deliverables? How do we capture our dialogues and conversations which really contains the value of our work? I believe there are various projects out there that is trying to solve this problem by literally capturing the brainstorming sessions into digital format. If there is something out there that is a packaged description of what we do, I would love to see people post links to those types of projects.

Great article in NYTimes(free registrated required) related to information retrieval, categorization/classification, and use.

"Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom"

Marti Hearst is quoted regarding information vizualization, text mining, and such. Most of the focus was on retrieval in homogenous content such as Medline. The reason why I liked the article was it provides an example of how people/business benefit from better IR tools for such disciplines as medicine.

Interesting article in Business Week Online regarding paid placements and some potential controversy involving small businesses. I found the link at searchengineposition.com.

Web Searches: The Fix Is In
by Ben Elgin, October 6, 2003

The Dublin Core 2003 Conference is currently going on in Seattle this week. A couple of the attendees and I will be sharing our notes(and photos) when we've recovered(it's actually still going on). But until then, enjoy the conference proceedings online.

Great article on the soft skills we need as IAs to win/influence folks with whom we work with.

Soft Skills for Information Architecture by our very own Jeff Lash over at Digital Web.

A little play on an axiom that stuck out for me and I know will help me get through the requirements and design process:

Grant me the strength to improve the features that I can
Accept the features that I cannot
And give me the wisdom to know the difference

FYI: Just noticed that the ASIST site mentioned ...

Information Architecture, February 28-29, 2004, Austin, TX

When a site comes up we'll put a link here, however I think saving the date helps folks plan their budgets for conferences next year.

Stumbled on an AP article through NY Times(Free Reg Required) that Yahoo to buy Overture for $1.6B Deal.

Just got this from a colleague at work. For all you MAC users out there who work with XML, this is something that could be of interest.

Morphon XML-Editor

Ok, as much as I like serendipity, I really want to aggregate the DUX notes out there. I was not fortunate enough to head to DUX last weekend, but I've been randomly stumbling onto the notes. Please post your notes or links to your notes if possible in the comments:

Amy Lee
Boxes & Arrows (Erin Malone)
Brad Lauster and Day 2
Update:
Aaron Oppenheimer
Gene Smith's Photos
Celia Romaniuk's notes on Buxton & Kapor
Uday Gajendar
Danny O'Brien in which he somewhat apologizes for the panel that he was on...

Interesting article on Google Dance Syndrome by Chris Sherman over at SearchEngineWatch.com. Apparently there are many webmasters out there who are fixated on how they rank in Google to the point they worry and try to optimize. I have to admit I kind of review the sites of many of our web authors in the Google index, but I also review other sites such as Teoma and MSN :) Who doesn't? I'm curious about freshness,coverage, and depth for these engines, and it gives me a good idea about how our sites are doing from referrals from these engines. I'm curious to hear if others monitor their company's sites in the various search engines.

CIO article "Sleuthing out data" by Fred Hapgood features a couple examples of how auto-semiauto categorization enables businesses and reduce costs. There is a company list included if you're interested in this arena.

Just came back from a conference on data management(Wilshire Metadata/DAMA International 2003 Conference. A recurring topic that surfaced about data management was the relevance of their work in relation to unstructured information. A reality check for everyone was that most corporate information actually existed in semi-structured of unstructured information and not in databases. From this thought, I was directed to DM Review and in particular this article. Digging Into the Web: XML, Meta Data and Other Paths to Unstructured Data - By Robert Blumberg and Shaku Atre. I definitely see an opportunity between IA(metadata/ux) type folks cross-pollinating with data modelers and data managers. It will be interesting to see and I look forward to hearing more from here. Thoughts?

Both the SIG-IA list and a CMS list have surfaced an interesting thread today in regards to an article published at At New York, Study: Content Management Tools Fail. It discusses some high level findings from a Jupiter Research report on the dissatisfaction around the implementation and maintenance of Content Management Systems. I don't have access to the report, but very interesting.

It looks as though Microsoft is looking into XRML for their rights management. More information at The Register:

Microsoft devs Windows Rights Management Services
By John Leyden

This site was recommended by a fellow engineer at work. It's basically the support/info site for the O'Reilly Book Practical RDF by Shelley Powers et al. They have chapter samples online and it's an interesting practical perspective in applying RDF. Many other resources are mentioned that supplement the book's offerings.

My colleague at work just shared this link with me. The site has lots of great content around XML and this really cool top 100 list of XML related acronyms.

Just stumbled on this Fast Company article "Desire: Connecting With What Customer Want." Some of it sounds very familiar from one of Lou's presentation at least year's summit and little bit of Maslow's Hierarchy of Need. From a marketing standpoint it makes sense, but user researchers out there should still take a look because it could possibly be just as valid for your line of work as well. The article is based on a book by Melinda Davis _Culture of Desire_ (2002).

Just stumbled onto this tools called Huminity that creates a contacts management web of all the people you know. I thought it would be interesting for folks interested in social networks.