Archive for June, 2010

Each month when I update the ITI Conference Calendar, I am on the lookout for items of interest that may not be appropriate for a simple listing of conferences.  I will post them here as “Conference NewsNotes”.  Here are the items for July 2010.

• At the Spring meeting of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information (CINF), Randy Marcinko of Marcinko Enterprises presented “Profitable Publishing: My Journey From Edge Notched Cards to Semantic Edge“.  View his slides.
• The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) has started a blog for its 15th Information Online conference, to be held in Sydney, February 1-3.
• News from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI):
  • Dr. Joan K. Lippincott will deliver the keynote speech at the 2nd International Symposium on Information Management in the Changing World, to be held from September 22-24, 2010, in Ankara, Turkey. In her speech, entitled “‘My Information’: Digital Libraries, Social Networking, and the User Experience“, Dr. Lippincott will talk about the impact of social networks and mobile devices in creating and maintaining personal information environments. She will stress that it is vital to understand user needs and behaviors if libraries, archives and museums are to be an integral part of users’ information habitats.  Further information here.
  • Interviews from the Spring 2010 CNI membership meeting are available here.
  • Clifford Lynch, CNI Executive Director, delivered the 20th Annual Elizabeth W. Stone Lecture, sponsored by the School of Information and Library Sciences at the Catholic University of America.  View the video.
  • A podcast of another keynote presentation by Clifford Lynch, entitled “e-Research and New Challenges in Knowledge Structuring”, is available here.

Please send me suggestions for items to be included in future NewsNotes postings; they will be most welcome!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger

SLA’s 2011 Annual Conference will be held June 12-15 in Philadelphia, PA.

See you there!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger

I always try to attend the sessions of the Chemistry and Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition divisions of SLA because they have interesting speakers and topics.  At the last two SLA conferences, attendees heard about the science of beer and coffee.  This year, being in New Orleans, what better topic to explore than hot sauce?  And this session not only provided some fascinating facts about hot sauce, but samples as well!

Dr. Ben Villalon, retired Texas Extension food chemist and specialist in peppers and chiles (which is why he is known as “Dr. Pepper”) entertained the audience with many little known facts about these spicy food items.

About 20 years ago, Villalon was responsible for discovering  why pepper plants were being afflicted with a virus and dying, and he developed new virus-resistant varieties and saved the crops.  The compound responsible for the heat in peppers is capsaicin, a chemical compound that stimulates nerve endings in the skin, and especially the mucous membranes.   It is mildly addictive.  When you eat hot peppers, you can destroy the nerve endings, but in young people, they regenerate themselves quickly.  In older people, it can take up to two weeks to regenerate the nerve endings.  Since capsaicin is odorless, you cannot tell hot hot a pepper is by smelling it.

There are more than 25 different species of chile peppers, and the most highly consumed pepper in the US is the green bell pepper (which is not spicy because it contains no capsaicin).  Bell peppers are a very healthy food; they have five times more Vitamin C than citrus or tomatoes!

In a jalapeño pepper, capsicum, the flavor-producing chemical, is contained in small yellow blisters on the inside walls of the skin. Most peppers are hotter at the top (stem) end.  The heat of a pepper is measured on the Scoville Heat Scale, which measures the amount of capsaicin in the pepper.

Following Villalon’s talk, Daniel (“Shoney”) Lima, chef at a local restaurant (Juan’s Flying Burrito, which is known for its extensive selection of salsas of all spiciness levels) prepared a delicious mango salsa and provided samples to the audience.  (Interestingly, more salsa is sold in the US than ketchup!)

Lima kindly provided his recipe and gave me permission to post it here on my blog.

Mango Salsa
Chef Daniel Lima, Juan’s Flying Burrito

2 ripe Mangoes, diced
1 bunch Cilantro, finely chopped
1 Red Onion, diced
2 cups Pico de Gallo or Salsa Fresca*
1/2 cup Black Beans, cooked or canned
1/2 cup Sweet Corn, cooked or canned
1 Tbsp Chili Powder
1/4 cup Brown Sugar
1/4 cup Red Wine Vinegar
Pinch of Salt “to taste”
1 fresh Jalapeño Pepper, seeded and finely chopped

Combine all ingredients into mixing bowl.  Mix.  Cover and chill in refrigerator before serving.

*1 tomato, 1 white onion, 1 bunch cilantro, 2 Tbsp lime juice, chopped and combined

What a great session this was!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger

It’s a question many of us are asking with increasing frequency.  In these days of simply putting a few words into a search box, is it really worth all the time, effort, and resources that have been put into constructing (sometimes elaborate) controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and metadata?  Are we really providing added value to our users?  It’s true that information professionals, especially in some disciplines (like medicine), rely on controlled vocabularies to aid search, but most end users don’t know how to use them.  A panel led by Susanne BeDell, Vice President of ProQuest and General Manager of Dialog, looked into this issue.

In her introduction to the session, Suzanne BeDell noted that entity extraction is used by publishers to add functionality to articles.  For example, Nature Publishing Group uses TEMIS’s software to identify chemicals.  Analytics and data mining add another layer of capability to the traditional industry structure of primary journals, abstracting & indexing services,  and search and aggregation.   Analytics are used to identify knowledge buried in unstructured content, and they are usually based on statistical analysis of content or natural language processing.

Jabe Wilson, Sr. Solutions Manager at Elsevier agreed, suggesting that taxonomies are more important today than they have ever been and, because they are based on words, they underlie developments of new technologies.   He defined the difference between a dictionary, taxonomy, and an ontology  The relations between each are shown in the following map.

Tim Mohler, Vice President, Operations, Lexalytics Inc. reviewed human indexing, noting that although it makes navigation easier for users, the drawback is that it is expensive because indexers are scarce, and indexing entails considerable effort.  Because users tend not to use complex taxonomies, many information producers simply index their content by machine.  However, machine indexing depends on developing rules based on the content, and Mohler wondered if a model could be built to guide the machine, based on a taxonomy.  This is still an unanswered question.

Tyron Stadig, CTO and Founder of Innography, echoed a similar theme, saying that analytics as applied to business intelligence can be used to predict future trends, uncover behavioral patterns, link seemingly unrelated behavior, and identify outliers.  Structured data helps people make decisions; taxonomies can provide additional attributes of the text to enhance decision making.  Multiple taxonomies can be used in a process called “fingerprinting”, and they can also create additional links between data sources, so that you can find information that would otherwise not be evident.  Structured information is necessary for analytics; simple keywords aren’t enough.  Taxonomies provide additional features to unstructured text and identify its useful attributes.

So are taxonomies worth the effort necessary to construct them?  Based on the examples given by the speakers, the answer is, “Indeed, they are!”

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger

Many of Tuesday’s sessions deal with taxonomies, and it is disappointing that, unless you have perfected the ability to be in two places simultaneously, it is impossible to attend them all.  The first one I chose dealt with how taxonomy work can contribute to knowledge management in an organization.

Patrick Lambe, Founder of Straits Knowledge, a Singapore-based consulting firm, and author of Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness (which received four 5-star reviews on Amazon) was the speaker and noted that his talk was on “taxonomy work”, not the taxonomies themselves.  Taxonomies are not solely about organizing content.  A number of disciplines, including information and library science, contribute to their development, and their applications include content management, document management, and metadata.  Taxonomists are often frustrated and challenged by a general lack of understanding of their work, technology limitations, and unrealistic expectations by users.

To be effective, organizations must follow four principles, many of which can be affected by taxonomy work:

1. All organizations must deal with risk and diagnose it.
2. They must reduce cost and manage cash flow, which inolves managing information about internal processes.
3. They must add value for customers and markets. What do customers want? This requires pushing information out to the customer and informing them about available products. An organization with many products must segment the customers, which is a taxonomy. For example, calls coming into a center can be organized into a taxonomy.
4. Create a new reality and innovation by mixing and matching categories. Some people say taxonomies cannot describe innovation because they describe history, but many innovation initiatives start by describing the present, which istaxonomy work.

Coordination, learning, and remembering are three key knowledge-related activities in which organizations can engage and taxonomy work can play a leading part in all of them.  For example,

• Coordination: Taxonomy work helps people coordinate and use the same terms when describing something, decision making, and setting objectives.
• Remembering:  Taxonomies can help in categorizing history, linking and tracking how different terms have changed over time, and in reusing knowledge.
• Learning:  Taxonomies track how descriptions change and can lead users to the correct term to use in educational activities, thus acquiring and spreading the right expertise.

In his work, Lambe has used Cynefin Diagrams to help people how to decide what to do in different situations.  The photo below shows how they might apply to taxonomy work.

Taxonomies mainly operate in the area of what is known, but they can also be used to help detect patterns about what is happening.  For example, in the areas of structure and organizing and establishing common ground (lower right of the above diagram), taxonomies might help design smoother workflows and provide for better reuse of information and knowledge.   Boundary spanning refers to coordination and better use of information assets across disparate workgroups in an organization and a reduction of duplication of effort.  And finally, sense-making and discovery will lead to greater confidence in decision making and communication among teams.  Lambe also noted that sometimes it is useful to construct a “disposable taxonomy” to create a concept map of how domains relate to each other and which ones should be further explored, and then discard it at the end of a project.

Lambe’s presentation was a fascinating look at the potential of taxonomies and provided an insight into this highly technical subject.  I thought I knew quite a bit about taxonomies, but I learned a lot from this session.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger