I'm not going to take exhaustive notes on any of the paper sessions, unless someone says something particularly interesting. All of the papers are online for your reading pleasure.
Having said that, here are some random notes and observations:
Day spoke about metadata registries, a topic I'm not all that interested in. But, he did note that metadata is expensive, and will likely become more expensive. Good point, and one that often gets lost...
I attended a special session on "Smart Metadata." One of the speakers talked about learning objects. This is an area that keeps coming up, and I need to look a bit closer into this concept. In an attempt to do just that, I attended the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) plenary session. These are the folks behind the Learning Objects Metadata standard. I was hoping to hear a bit about the standard, and maybe some about how it is being used today. Instead, I got a couple of hours on the standards-making process and the IEEE org chart. It was about as exciting as you think it is. Good thing I had wireless access...
Still in the realm of education, a more useful talk was that of John Kendall of Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL). Kendall spoke about the "Use of Metadata for the Identification and retrieval of Resources for K-12 Education. McREL has compiled standards from across the nation into a searchable system. Kendall's talk focused on creating a schema that would allow educational resources to be tagged and retrieved based on a variety of educational standards. It looks to be interesting work, and I'll need to take a closer look at the paper.
Shifting gears, I attended a session on project management. A number of informed observers noted that this was a new topic to the Dublin Core, and also a bit of an odd one. I had high hopes. There are quite a number of areas in the project management world that could benefit from metadata-driven information systems. Project planning, tracking, and communication would seem to be areas where metadata could help make a difference. Although the speakers were not bad, they seemed to focus primarily on metadata for project outcomes. So the question shifted from "how do you use metadata in project management?" to "how do you use metadata to track the documents produced by a project?" This is still an interesting question, and a difficult one for large organizations with big projects (representatives from NASA and Boeing spoke on this panel). But it seems quite close to the traditional world of archives and corporate libraries.
Another speaker in this group, Barbara Richards from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, mentioned a system for tracking projects at a high level. The hope, I believe, was that others could use the system to learn information about projects similar to their own. This system tracked information such as:
Richards mentioned that other systems contained information about the target audiences, impacts, and sustainability of the projects.
I know that this idea of being able to track projects, for both knowledge management and measurement of goals, is growing in importance.
The plenary speaker is Mary Lee Kennedy of Microsoft's Knowledge Network Group. She is speaking on meeting employee needs using information architecture and management. I'm going to jot down some rough notes. If I can find a copy of her presentation, I'll link to it.
The focus is really on the employee and the business, rather than the technology. Good start.
They've identified six criteria of information excellence. An excellent information system should help employees:
Their area of focus is organizing the intranet, finding the right information, and finding people and their knowledge.
One of the places they started at was talking to people about information lifecycle management. They thought this would be hard, but it turned out that people got the concepts very easily.
Then, they built a site directory. Each site within the intranet is tagged with a variety of metadata, allowing users to find their way to the sites via the main microsoftweb portal.
Microsoft's internet and intranet share a taxonomy (probably multiple taxonomies). One nifty application for the intranet was a glossary lookup tool. This tool simply exposed some of the taxonomy data in a simple way on the intranet. The hope was that this tool would help address the problem of employees using similar terms to mean different things.
Kennedy outlined the four key pieces of their enterprise architecture:
She finished by talking about the challenges Microsoft faces in this arena:
Over all, it was a good talk. I've heard a good deal of the detail before, but she put it together in a nice way.
I'm attending the 2003 Dublin Core Conference during the next three days. For non-metadata geeks, the phrase "Dublin Core" might be a tad opaque. The Dublin Core is a metadata standard that has gained a fair amount of traction for its simplicity and expandability.
You can check out the Online Proceedings. They've organized the papers using a faceted classification scheme. I actually think its a tad hard to use, but its there. I have a fat printed version. Should make for interesting night-time reading.
I'm hoping to post interesting bits on the conference on this weblog.
Oh, and by the way, the Bell Harbor conference center is really, really nice.
Update: Ariadne has published a conference report by Pete Johnston.
uPortal might be interesting for larger organizations, either for a public website or for an intranet:
uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. This group sees an institutional portal as an abridged and customized version of the institutional Web presence... a "pocket-sized" version of the campus Web. Portal technology adds "customization" and "community" to the campus Web presence. Customization allows each user to define a unique and personal view of the campus Web. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies.
CMSWatch's Tony Byrne has an interesting article on products that incorporate some CMS functionality. Byrne covers the Xythos Web File Server (a WebDAV implementation), Oracle's Internet File System and Portal, and Macromedia's Contribute. The latter is the most interesting to me, in that a number of the organizations I work with (including my own) either use or want to use Contribute. Byrne points out that Contribute only really works for static pages, throwing the notion of content reuse out the window. And, more interestingly, he addresses the concept of distributing web publishing throughout the organization:
The distributed webmaster organizational pattern raises numerous cautionary flags from an enterprise viewpoint, and I don't think it will survive a few more years of web publishing process improvements. However, Contribute can make that model more scalable and efficent in the meantime.
Here's a great new(-ish) weblog that makes the connection between baseball and management practices. Very interesting reading.
Bill Trippe has posted a short list of aspects present in successful content management projects:
Successful projects have champions.
Successful projects have metrics.
Successful projects begin with a lot of skepticism.
Yes, I realize that I made fun of the word "Enterprise" recently, but I'm back with another Enterprise related topic.
Lou Rosenfeld has posted a very interesting chart for Enterprise Information Architecture development (45k PDF).
The chart is a vague timeline of activities that an organization might undertake. Rosenfeld includes activities like taxonomy design, web site indices and navigation, content modeling, metadata development, search, weblogs, and wikis. Any mid to large size organization could take this and sketch out a plan of attack quite easily. And, looking over the chart, I think most of the ideas are pretty good.
A minor semantic quibble: Coming from my background, I'd be inclined to call these activities "Information Management," not (Enterprise) "Information Architecture." I'm pretty sure that we're talking about the same things here. Off the top of my head, the only things I can think of that I'd call Information Management that aren't on Rosenfeld's chart are some of the "softer" activities like Communities of Practice.
Interesting lecture by Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the World Wide Web) at the Royal Society. Talks alot about the Semantic Web concept.
The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has posted a nifty list of "tools" for use in IA-related projects. Right now, there is a short list of checklists, templates, and other documents. Hopefully, the list grows over time.
I'd love to see them create an RSS feed so I could be notified whenever the list gets updated. Oh well...
Interesting concept: Moveover announced that they are offering an "Enterprise-Grade Weblog Search." Ignoring the fact that the word "enterprise" rivals "solutions" for the title of dumbest marketing-speak ever, there is some interesting stuff going on here.
First, they've identified 25,000 "business-critical" weblogs to spider (or, rather, to grab RSS feeds from). They've apparently "hand-selected" these, but there's no info on the criteria. Twenty-five thousand blogs sounds like a lot at first, but remember that most weblogs are quite narrow in focus. It would be interesting to see how much coverage is given to any one specific area.
The next interesting bit is here:
To overcome the issue of the variable quality of blog content the team of human editors at Moreover Technologies assigns each blog a ranking that corresponds to the reliability, integrity and caliber of the blog thus enabling users to instantly identify high value information. Additionally, each blog is tagged with a wide range of metadata including, but not limited to, the number of incoming and outgoing links to it as well as the blog's status in the wider blogging community.
So they're slapping metadata on each post. Very cool. I'd love to see the thesaurus/taxonomy they have driving the search. I wonder if they're really hand-tagging each post. Sounds pretty expensive and time consuming with 25,000 sources, but it looks like they do similar things with other content. They're probably using a combination of automatic and human classification. Since most weblogs come with some amount of metadata, this task could be make a bit easier. Still, its pretty cool.
I couldn't find any other info on their site outside of the press release.
(via Gilbane)
Phil Windley writes of a conversation he had with a small business owner who needs to work 12 hours a day to stay on top of everything that happens in his expanding business. For the leadership there there is a need to understand (and even control) many aspects of an organization. But working more hours doesn't really scale up very well. Windley, being a former CIO, sees IT as a solution to this problem.
A few things worth noting:
This problem isn't confined to small businesses (and I don't think Windley suggests that it is). Organization leaders (in the educational realm, principals, directors, and superintendents) need a good understanding of what is happening in their organizations. The problem becomes more acute when dealing with larger organizations.
This is an area where IT can make the transition from consuming organizational resources ($$) to really helping to move an organization forward. This can be done by helping manage and facilitate the flow of information. This sort of information management can be quite useful both at the tactical level (what's happening now, and in the near-term) and at the strategic level (longer term trends).
Windley puts forth this idea of a IT maturity hierarchy. At the bottom of this hierarchy we see core IT functions, like infrastructure and storage. At the top, information and business intelligence. Windley sees the bottom layers as hurdles that many small businesses have not yet passed on their way to the more valuable bits on the top.
Even though I'm not sure its possible, I'd like to try and separate the notions of IT (which most often focuses on matters of infrastructure--servers, networks, and the like) and information management. Although it would be considerably more difficult, I think that you could put together a useful information management strategy in the absence of some of the lower-layer items. Or at least, information management could exist alongside other IT activities, rather than being dependent on them.
Interesting. Baseball lessons for software teams.
Here's a great idea on creating subject indexes from James Robertson. Robertson's index has the following information (and/or links to) about each topic:
High level information
Detailed information
Forms
Responsible team
He's using the concept in the intranet arena, but I think it would work great for the public website of diverse organizations, like PSESD.
Jeff Veen has a nice little article summerizing the Business Value of Web Standards. His main points are that standards:
It's a wonder everyone isn't doing it...
Jeffery Zeldman provides and nice summary and some analysis about the Microsoft-Eolas patent case. Long story short: as a result of the case, it looks like concept of browser plug-ins (that allow a variety of technologies--Macromedia Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Apple Quicktime, Real Player, and even Windows Media Player--to appear in the browser window) might be in serious danger. Zeldman elaborates on the theory that Microsoft, the "loser" in this case, might actually want to lose in order to harm the competition.
Regardless, if plug-ins go away, there are going to be a lot of losers. It will be a big pain for site owners and developers who have relied on plug-ins. And the end user experience will likely suffer as well.
Michael Angeles, founder of the IASlash website, has posted slides from his recent presentation on using weblogs in a corporate environment. His company, Lucent, has used them for knowledge management, and Michael discusses some great ideas for making these initiatives successful.
One of the most important insights is that the technical aspects of setting up a weblog system are "trivial when compared to the strategy and resources required to actually pull off" a successful system. I've found this to be very true.
Uche Ogbuji has recently published an article on the The State of the Python-XML Art, 2003. The bulk of the article is a very useful list of all of the python software projects that involve XML processing.
The article reminds me of my recent unpleasant attempts to get a working XSLT processor installed on a python 2.3 installation on Mac OS X. Here's a run-down of the software I tried, and the results:
I noticed that Uche's list included Pyana. I seem to think I might have looked at this once before, but I'll clearly need to give it another whirl. Or just break down and install all of this on my windows box.
Phil Windley points to a Danish government whitepaper that makes draws an analogy between city planning and enterprise technical architectures. To further the analogy, I'd imagine that many organizations look more like sprawl than well-planned communities: pedestrian unfriendly roads and big-box retail.
Max Design has a nice collection of different methods one can use to style lists. You can take a simple list and turn it into a variety of things, including navigation menus.
Update: Accessify's List-o-matic (not related to the page above). Its an easy to use web form that can allow anyone to create a nifty CSS-styled list-based menu. Nifty.
Another nice column by James Robertson: The value of intranet feedback:
There is one feature that you can implement on an intranet that can be tremendously effective in ensuring content is kept up-to-date, assisting with change management, and promoting wide-spread cultural change. This feature is a simple but effective intranet feedback mechanism for staff to use. This is something that we have used to great effect in the past, and it's more than just putting a "feedback" link at the bottom of every page.
While we're at it, check out another new Robertson article: Drawing clear lines between information systems.
If there are still people out there who think that you can't create attractive sites with standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, check out Ryan Carver's writeup of his design for Lee Jeans One True Fit. The site uses Flash, XHTML Strict, and a whole lot of CSS for layout and style. Carver's writeup includes plenty of great tips on CSS techniques and hacks.
Oh, and while we're at it, check out Attractive, Accessible Web Sites.
Both links via Zeldman, no stranger to attractive, standards-compliant sites. That is, as long as you don't use his default low-contrast-hard-to-read stylesheet.